Harold Pinter Biography and List of Works

English playwright who achieved international success as one of the most complex post-World War II dramatist. Pinter's plays are noted for their use of silence to increase tension, understatement, and cryptic small talk. Equally recognizable are the 'Pinteresque' themes - nameless menace, erotic fantasy, obsession and jealousy, family hatred and mental disturbance.

"Pinter's dialogue is as tightly - perhaps more tightly - controlled than verse. Every syllable, every inflection, the succession of long and short sounds, words and sentences, is calculated to nicety. And precisely the repetitiousness, the discontinuity, the circularity of ordinary vernacular speech are here used as formal elements with which the poet can compose his linguistic ballet."
(Martin Esslin in The People Wound, 1970)

Harold Pinter was born in East London, the son of a Jewish tailor. On the outbreak of World War II he was evacuated and returned to London when he was 14.Pinter was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School where he admired and read the works of Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway, and acted in school productions. After two unhappy years at the London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art he left his studies. In 1949 Pinter was fined by magistrates for refusing to do his national service because he was a conscientious objector.

In 1950 Pinter started to publish poems in the magazine Poetry (London) and worked as an actor on a BBC Radio programme, Focus on Football Pools. He studied for a short time at the Central School of Speech and Drama and toured Ireland from 1951 to 1952. In 1953 he worked for Donald Wolfit's company in Hammersmith.

After four more years in provincial repertory theatre under the pseudonym David Baron, Pinter began to write for the stage. His first full-length play, THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, was produced in 1958. The play dealt in a Kafkaesque manner with an apparently ordinary man who is threatened by strangers for an unknown reason. He tries to run away but is tracked down. Most reviewers were hostile, but in rapid succession Pinter produced a body of work, which has made him the master of 'the comedy of menace.'

Pinter's major plays are usually set in a single room, whose occupants are threatened by forces or people whose precise intentions neither the characters nor the audience can define. Usually his characters are engaged in a struggle for survival or identity. Pinter refuses to provide rational justifications for action, but offers existential glimpses of bizarre or terrible moments in people's lives. In MONOLOGUE (1973) and NO MAN'S LAND (1975) the characters use words as their weapons in their struggles, not only for survival but also for sanity.

ASTON - You said you wanted me to get you up.
DAVIES - What for?
ASTON - You said you were thinking of going to Sidcup.
DAVIES - Ay, that'd be a good thing, if I got there.
ASTON - Doesn't look like much of a day.
DAVIES - Ay, well, that's shot it, en't it?
(from The Caretaker)

In 1960 Pinter wrote THE DUMB WAITER. With his second full-length play, THE CARETAKER (1960), Pinter made his reputation as a major modern talent. It was followed by A SLIGHT ACHE (1961), THE COLLECTION (1962), THE DWARFS (1963), THE LOVER (1963) and THE HOMECOMING (1965), perhaps the most enigmatic of all his works. After BETRAYAL (1978) Pinter wrote no new full-length plays until MOONLIGHT (1994). Short plays include A KIND OF ALASKA (1982), inspired by the case histories in Oliver Sack's Awakenings (1973).

The Homecoming (1965) - After teaching philosophy at an American university for six years, Teddy brings his wife Ruth home to London to meet his family: his father Max, a nagging, aggressive ex-butcher and other member of the all-male household. At the end Teddy returns alone to his university job in America. No one needs him and he needs no one. Ruth stays as a mother or whore to his family. Everyone needs her. - Similar motifs - the battle for domination in a sexual context - recur in Landscape and Silence (both 1969), and In Old Times (1971)

Several of Pinter's plays were originally written for British radio or TV. From the 1970s Pinter directed a number of stage plays and the American Film Theatre production of Butler (1974). In 1977 he published a screenplay based on Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps perdu. Closely associated with the director Peter Hall (1930-), he became an associate director of the National Theatre after Hall was nominated as the successor to Lawrence Olivier. Pinter has received many awards, including Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear in 1963, BAFTA`s, (1965 and 1971), the Hamburg Shakespeare Prize in 1970, the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or in 1971, and the Commonwealth Award in 1981. He was made CBE in 1966. Pinter was married to the actress Vivien Merchant. They divorced in 1981. In the same year Pinter married the biographer Lady Antonia Fraser.

Pinter has written a number of screenplays, including The Servant (1963), The Accident (1967), The Go-Between (1971), The Last Tycoon (1974, dir. by Elia Kazan), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981, novel by John Fowles), Betrayal (1982), Turtle Diary (1985), Reunion (1989), The Handmaid's Tale (1990), The Comfort of Strangers (1990), and The Trial by Franz Kafka (1990).

For further reading: Kafka and Pinter by Raymond Armstrong (1999); The Life and Work of Harold Pinter by Michael Billington (1997); Harold Pinter and the New British Theatre by D. Keith Peacock (1997); Harold Pinter: A Question of Timing by Martin S. Regal (1995); The Pinter Ethic by Penelope Prentice (1994); Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power by Marc Silverstein (1993); Harold Pinter by Chittanranjan Misra (1993); Critical Essays on Harold Pinter by Steven H. Gale (1990); Pinter in Play by Susan Hollis Merritt (1990); Harold Pinter by Volker Strunk (1989); Pinter's Female Portraits by Elizabeth Sakellaridou (1988); Harold Pinter, ed. by Stephen H. Gale (1986); Making Pictures by Joanne Klein (1985); Harold Pinter, ed. by Alan Bold (1985); The Dream Structure of Pinter's Plays by Lucina Paquet Gabard (1977); Harold Pinter by R. Hayman (1975); The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter by Jatherine H. Burkman (1971); Harold Pinter by W. Kerr (1968); Harold Pinter by W. Baker and S.E. Tabachnik (1973); Theatre and Anti-Theatre by R. Hayman (1979); The Peopled Wound by Martin Esslin (1970); Anger and After by J.R. Taylor (1969)

THE ROOM, (1957)