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EspañolHAROLD PINTER
'Harold Pinter', CH, CBE (born 10 October 1930) is an English playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor (also known as 'David Baron'), director, author, political activist and Nobel Laureate. The author of 29 plays and 26 screenplays spanning a career of over fifty years, he is best known for his plays ''The Birthday Party'' (1957), ''The Caretaker'' (1959), ''The Homecoming'' (1964), and ''Betrayal'' (1978), and for his screenplay adaptations of novels by others, such as ''The Servant'' (1963), ''The Go-Between'' (1970), ''The French Lieutenant's Woman'' (1981), and ''The Trial'' (1993). Pinter has been recognized internationally for his widespread cultural and artistic influence and his achievements in multiple genres and media since the 1960s. In December 2005 Pinter received the Nobel Prize in Literature (in absentia, due to illness). In its citation, the Academy states that "Harold Pinter is generally regarded as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century"."Biobibliographical Notes" in "Bio-bibliography" for Harold Pinter, by The Swedish Academy, ''The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005'', The Nobel Foundation, ''NobelPrize.org'', Oct. 2005, precede a "Bibliography" of selected publications (mostly in English but also including some in French, German, and Swedish), compiled by the Swedish Academy. (These notes include the full Nobel Prize "Citation".)[1] On 17 January 2007 Pinter received the Légion d'honneur, France's highest civil honor.Press accounts appear on the official website of the French Embassy in the United Kingdom, "Harold Pinter Awarded Légion d'Honneur", ''France in the United Kingdom'' 17 Jan. 2007, and on press sites; e.g., "French PM Honours Harold Pinter", ''BBC News'' 18 Jan. 2007. He is the recipient of seventeen honorary degrees as well as numerous other awards.
His works, his political activities, and his winning the Nobel Prize have all been the subject of voluminous critical commentary. Pinter's dramatic work is marked by theatrical pauses and silences, ambiguity, irony, menace, comedic timing, witty dialogue, provocative imagery, strong conflicts among ambivalent characters fighting for verbal and territorial dominance and for their own remembered versions of the past.Michael Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' (1996; London: Faber and Faber, 2007). This is the revised, expanded, and updated edition of ''The Life and Work of Harold Pinter'', first published in hardback in 1996 and reissued in paperback in 1997. 394–430 of the 2007 ed. includes "Afterword: 'Let's Keep Fighting'", discussing reactions to Pinter's Nobel Prize and Lecture on 424–27, followed by "''Appendix'': Art, Truth & Politics", containing "The Nobel Lecture" (431–42). Billington is Pinter's official biographer; this is the official authorized biography of Harold Pinter. (Parenthetical references to this updated ed. appear in the text. Prior to the "Afterword", the pagination of all three editions is mostly the same.) In the mid-1980s, Pinter began dramatizing more-overtly political situations with more prominent political implications, reflecting his own heightening political interests and changes in his personal life (Merritt, ''Pinter in Play'' xi–xv, 170–209; Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 286–338; Grimes 19). His highly-controversial Nobel Lecture, "Art, Truth & Politics", delivered on video, is a culmination of decades of both prolific literary and theatrical activity and increasingly-committed political activism. Those who do not appreciate Pinter's work or his "Leftist" political activities and views tend to charge him with "anti-Americanism" and to question the validity of his critique (Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 424-28). Pinter and his supporters, including many Americans, point out that he criticizes policies and practices of American administrations, not American citizens (Pinter, ''Various Voices'' 243), that his political analyses depend upon his sharp critical acumen (Merritt, ''Pinter in Play'' 171-89, 208; Grimes 19), and that he is "a man of infinite complexity and abundant contradiction" (Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 388).
Though in 2005 he announced that he would stop writing plays, in May 2006, Pinter wrote a new dramatic sketch, "Apart From That". In October 2006 he performed the role of Krapp in Samuel Beckett's play ''Krapp's Last Tape'' in a limited run at the Royal Court Theatre to sold-out audiences and "ecstatic" critical reviews, "probably the best Pinter has received in his entire life" (Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 429–30). Accepting the Europe Theatre Prize in Turin, Italy, in March 2006, he vowed to write poetry "'until I conk out'" (Qtd. in Merritt, "Europe Theatre Prize Celebration"). Prevailing over persistent health challenges, in June 2006, Pinter attended "a celebration of his work in cinema organised by the British branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures" (Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 429). His most recent screenplay adapts the 1970 Tony Award-winning play ''Sleuth'' by Anthony Shaffer, for the film ''Sleuth'', starring Michael Caine and Jude Law, which debuted at the 64th Venice International Film Festival on 31 August 2007.
Biography
Pinter was born in Hackney in London to working class, native English-Jewish parents of Eastern-European ancestry on 10 October 1930. Correcting general knowledge about Pinter's family background, Michael Billington, Pinter's authorized biographer, documents that "three of Pinter's grandparents hail from Poland and one from Odessa, making them Ashkenazic rather than Sephardic Jews" (''Harold Pinter'' 1–5). Pinter was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School. His evacuation to Cornwall and Reading from London during 1940 and 1941 before and during The Blitz and facing "the life-and-death intensity of daily experience" at that time influenced him profoundly (Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 5–10). Pinter discusses this experience in an interview entitled "Evacuees" conducted by B.S. Johnson in 1968 but not published until 1994. He wrote poetry frequently and published some of it as a teenager (and has continued to do so throughout his career). He played Romeo and Macbeth in 1947 and 1948, while still a student at Hackney Downs Grammar School in productions directed by his English tutor, mentor, and friend Joseph Brearley (Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 13–14).
Early theatrical training and stage experience
Beginning in autumn 1948, for two semesters, he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). Later that year, he was "called up for National Service", registered as a conscientious objector, was brought to trial twice, and ultimately fined by the magistrate for refusing to serve. He "loath[ed]" RADA, mostly cut classes, and dropped out in 1949. He had a minor role in ''Dick Whittington and His Cat'' at the Chesterfield Hippodrome in 1949–50. From January to July 1951, he attended "two terms" at the Central School of Speech and Drama (a constituent college of the University of London since 2005). From 1951–52, he toured Ireland with the Anew McMaster repertory company, playing over a dozen roles; in 1952 he began regional repertory acting jobs in England; and from 1953–54, he worked for the Donald Wolfit Company, King's Theatre, Hammersmith, performing nearly ten roles. From 1954 until 1959, Harold Pinter acted under the stage name 'David Baron'. Pinter's paternal "grandmother's maiden name was Baron … he adopted it as his stage-name … [and] used it [Baron] for the autobiographical character of Mark in the first draft of [his novel] ''The Dwarfs''" (Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 3).
As Billington observes, David Thompson "itemises all the performances Pinter gave in the [David] Baron years", including those in English regional repertory companies, in his book ''Pinter: The Player's Playwright'' (London: Macmillan, 1985), nearly twenty-five roles (''Harold Pinter'' 49–55). In an October 1989 interview with Mel Gussow, reprinted in ''Conversations with Pinter'' (Nick Hern Books), he states: "I was in English rep as an actor for about 12 years. My favourite roles were undoubtedly the sinister ones. They're something to get your teeth into" (83). During that period, he also performed occasional roles in his own and others' works (for radio, TV, and film), as he has done increasingly more recently (Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 20–25; 31, 36, 38).[2]
Personal life
From 1956 until 1980, Pinter was married to Vivien Merchant, a rep actress whom he met on tour, probably best known for her performance in the original film ''Alfie'' (1966). Their son, Daniel, was born in 1958. Through the early '70s, Merchant appeared in many of Pinter's works, most notably ''The Homecoming'' on stage (1965) and screen (1973). The marriage was turbulent and began disintegrating in the mid-1960s. For seven years, from 1962–69, Pinter was engaged in a clandestine affair with Joan Bakewell, which informed his play ''Betrayal'' (1978). Between 1975 and 1980, he lived with historian Lady Antonia Fraser, wife of Sir Hugh Fraser, and, in 1975, Merchant filed for divorce ("People"). The Frasers' divorce became final in 1977 and the Pinters' in 1980. In 1980, Pinter married Antonia Fraser.
Unable to overcome her bitterness and grief at the loss of her husband, Vivien Merchant died of acute alcoholism in October 1982. According to Michael Billington, Pinter "did everything possible to support" her until her death and regrets that he became estranged from their son, Daniel, after their separation and Pinter's remarriage. A reclusive gifted writer and musician, Daniel does not use the surname Pinter, adopting instead his maternal grandmother's maiden name, Brand, after his parents separated (''Harold Pinter'' 276, 255). Pinter stated publicly in several recent interviews that he remains "very happy" in his second marriage and enjoys family life, which includes his six adult step-children and sixteen step-grandchildren, and considers himself "a very lucky man in every respect" (Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 388, 429; Billington, comp., "'They said.…'"; Moss; and Wark).
Chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club, Pinter has called cricket one of his three great "loves." The other two are "love" (of women) and "writing" (Gussow, ''Conversations with Pinter'' 28–29). "Running" (as a teenage sprinter [29]) and "reading" are two other pleasures that he mentions at times in interviews. Pinter is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.
Main career (1957–2005)
Pinter is the author of twenty-nine plays, fifteen dramatic sketches, twenty-six screenplays and film scripts for cinema and television, a novel, and other prose fiction and essays, and co-author of two works for stage and radio. Along with the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play for ''The Homecoming'' and several other American awards and award nominations, he and his plays have received many awards in the UK and elsewhere throughout the world. His screenplays for ''The French Lieutenant's Woman'' and ''Betrayal'' were nominated for Academy Awards in the category of "Writing: Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium" in 1981 and 1983, respectively.
Pinter's first play, ''The Room'', written in 1957, was a student production at the Bristol University directed by (later acclaimed) actor Henry Woolf, who also originated the role of Mr. Kidd in that play (which he reprised in 2001). After his longtime friend Pinter had mentioned that he had an "idea" for a play, Woolf asked him to write it so that he could direct it as part of fulfilling requirements for his postgraduate work. Pinter wrote it in three days (Qtd. in Merritt, "Talking about Pinter" 147). To mark and celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of that first production of ''The Room'', Henry Woolf reprised his role of Mr. Kidd, as well as his role of the Man in Pinter's play ''Monologue'', as part of an international symposium at the University of Leeds, in April 2007.
''The Birthday Party'' (1957), Pinter's second play and among his best-known, was initially a disaster, despite a rave review in the ''Sunday Times'' by its influential drama critic Harold Hobson, which appeared only after the production had closed and could not be reprieved (Hobson, "The Screw Turns Again").[3] Hobson is generally credited by Pinter himself and other critics as bolstering him and perhaps even rescuing his career (Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 85); for example, in their September 1993 interview, Pinter told the ''New York Times'' critic Mel Gussow: "I felt pretty discouraged ''before'' Hobson. He had a tremendous influence on my life" (141). After the success of ''The Caretaker'' in 1960, which established Pinter's theatrical reputation, ''The Birthday Party'' was revived both on television (with Pinter himself in the role of Goldberg) and on stage and well received. By the time Peter Hall's production of ''The Homecoming'' (1964) reached New York (1967), Harold Pinter had become a celebrity playwright, and the play garnered four Tony awards, among other awards ("Harold Pinter" at the Internet Broadway Database).
In a review published in 1958, borrowing from the subtitle of ''A Lunatic View'', a play by David Campton, critic Irving Wardle also called Pinter's early plays "comedy of menace"––a label that people have applied repeatedly to his work, at times pigeonholing and attempting to tame it.[4] Such plays begin with an apparently innocent situation that becomes both threatening and absurd as Pinter's characters behave in ways often perceived as inexplicable by his audiences and one another. (Cf. Theatre of the Absurd.) Pinter acknowledges the influence of Samuel Beckett, particularly on his early work; they became friends, sending each other drafts of their works in progress for comments, as he told Kirsty Wark in their June 23, 2006 interview broadcast on ''Newsnight Review'' (BBC Two).
From the late sixties through the early eighties, Pinter wrote ''Landscape'', ''Silence'', "Night", ''Old Times'', ''No Man's Land'', ''Betrayal'', and ''The Proust Screenplay'', ''Family Voices'', and ''A Kind of Alaska'' , all of which dramatize aspects of memory and which critics sometimes categorize as Pinter's "memory plays".
Pinter began to direct more frequently during the 1970s, becoming an associate director of the National Theatre in 1973, and he has directed almost fifty productions of his own and others' plays for stage, film, and television.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, his plays tended to become shorter and more-overtly political, serving as critiques of oppression, torture, and other abuses of human rights (Merritt, ''Pinter in Play'' xi–xv, 170–209; Grimes 19). In a 1985 interview called "A Play and Its Politics", with Nicholas Hern, published in the Grove Press edition of ''One for the Road'', Pinter states that whereas his earlier plays presented "metaphors" about power and powerlessness, the later ones present "realities" of power and its abuse. Grimes proposes, "If it is too much to say that Pinter faults himself for his earlier political inactivity, his political theater dramatizes the interplay and conflict of the opposing poles of involvement and disengagement" (19). From 1993 to 1999, reflecting both personal and political concerns, Pinter wrote ''Moonlight'' (1993) and ''Ashes to Ashes'' (1996), full-length plays with domestic settings relating to death and dying and (in the latter case) to such "atrocities" as the Holocaust; in this period, after the deaths of first his mother and then his father, again merging the personal and the political, Pinter wrote the poems "Death" (1997) (which he read in his 2005 Nobel Lecture) and "The Disappeared" (1998).
In July and August 2001, a Harold Pinter Festival celebrating his work was held at Lincoln Center in New York City, in which he participated as both a director (of a double bill pairing his newest play ''Celebration'' with his first play ''The Room'') and an actor (as Nicolas in ''One for the Road'').Reports and reviews of the 2001 Lincoln Center Pinter Festival productions and symposia appear in ''The Pinter Review'' (2002); Merritt, "Talking about Pinter" summarizes and offers transcripts of the latter.
In October 2001, as part of a week-long "Harold Pinter Homage" at the World Leaders Festival, in Toronto, he presented a dramatic reading of ''Celebration'' (2000), following the reception and during the dinner honoring him, and also participated in a public interview (Press release, International Festival of Authors). That winter his collaboration with director Di Trevis resulted in their stage adaptation of his as-yet unfilmed 1972 work ''The Proust Screenplay'' (''Remembrance of Things Past'') being produced at the National Theatre, in London.[5] There was also a revival of ''The Caretaker'' in the West End.
Late in 2001, Pinter was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus, for which, in 2002, he underwent a successful operation and chemotherapy. During the course of his treatment, he directed a production of his play ''No Man's Land'', wrote and performed in his new sketch "Press Conference" for a two-part otherwise-retrospective production of his dramatic sketches at the National Theatre, and was seen on television in America in the role of Vivian Bearing's father in the HBO film version of Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play ''Wit''. Since then, having become increasingly politically "engaged" as "a citizen," Pinter has continued to write and present politically-charged poetry, essays, speeches and two new screenplay adaptations of plays, based on Shakespeare's ''King Lear'' (completed in 2000 but unfilmed) and on Anthony Shaffer's ''Sleuth'' (written in 2005, with revisions completed later for the 2007 film ''Sleuth''). Pinter's most recent stage play, ''Celebration'' (2000), is more a social satire, with fewer political resonances than plays like ''One for the Road'' (1984), ''Mountain Language'' (1988), ''Party Time'' (1991), and ''Ashes to Ashes'' (1996). His most recent dramatic work for radio, ''Voices'' (2005), a collaboration with composer James Clarke, adapting such selected works by Pinter to music, premièred on BBC Radio 3 on his 75th birthday (10 Oct. 2005), three days before the announcement that he had won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature (13 Oct. 2005).
Subsequent career developments
On 28 February 2005, in an interview with Mark Lawson on the BBC Radio 4 program ''Front Row'', Pinter announced publicly that he would stop writing plays to dedicate himself to his political activism and writing poetry: "I think I've written 29 plays. I think it's enough for me. I think I've found other forms now. My energies are going in different directions—over the last few years I've made a number of political speeches at various locations and ceremonies … I'm using a lot of energy more specifically about political states of affairs, which I think are very, very worrying as things stand."
According to one press account, "Pinter, whose last published play came out in 2000, said the reason he had given up writing was that he had 'written himself out', adding: 'I recently had a holiday in Dorset and took a couple of my usual yellow writing pads. I didn't write a damn word. Fondly, I turned them over and put them in a drawer'" (Qtd. in Robinson 6). It appeared to Robinson that "[D]espite giving up writing [Pinter] will carry on his acting career." From another perspective, however, as two other journalists observe: "So keenly is Harold Pinter relishing his return to the stage this autumn [in ''Krapp's Last Tape''] that he has put his literary career on the back burner" (Eden and Walker).
In March 2006, upon accepting the Europe Theatre Prize in Turin, Italy, as part of the cultural program of the XX Winter Olympic Games, Merritt reports, "Prior to vowing that he would be writing poetry 'until I conk out,' when Pinter reiterated 'I've written 29 damn plays. Isn't that enough?' many … [in the audience] felt compelled to reply, in unison, 'No-o-o-o-o-o!'" ("Europe Theatre Prize Celebration"). Yet he occasionally leaves open the possibility that if a compelling dramatic "image" were to come to mind (which he states as "not likely"), perhaps he would still be obliged to pursue it. Indeed, after making this point, at the end of his ''Newsnight Review'' interview with Kirsty Wark, broadcast on 23 June 2006, he and Rupert Graves performed a dramatic reading of a "new work" by Pinter, a "very funny" dramatic sketch called "Apart From That", inspired by Pinter's strong aversion to mobile telephones (He made clear that he does not own one); "as two people trade banalities over their mobile phones there is a hint of something ominous and unspoken behind the clichéd chat" (Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 429).
As he had announced that he planned to do, Pinter remains committed both to writing and publishing poetry (e.g., his poem "The Watcher") and to battling politically what he regards social injustice as well as personally his post-esophageal cancer bouts of ill health, including "a rare skin disease called pemphigus" and "a form of septicaemia which afflicts his feet and makes movement slow and laborious" (Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 394).
Political activism
Pinter was an early member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the United Kingdom and supported the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (1959–94), participating in British artists' refusal to permit professional productions of their work in South Africa in 1963 and in subsequent related campaign (Reddy). He has been active in International PEN, serving as a vice-president, along with American playwright Arthur Miller. In 1985, Pinter and Miller travelled to Turkey, on a mission co-sponsored by International PEN and a Helsinki Watch committee to investigate and protest the torture of imprisoned writers. There he met victims of political oppression and their families. At an American embassy dinner in Ankara, held in Miller's honor, at which Pinter was also an invited guest, speaking on behalf of those imprisoned Turkish writers, Pinter confronted the ambassador with (in Pinter's words) "[t]he reality … of electric current on your genitals": Pinter's outspokenness apparently angered their host and led to indications of his desired departure. Guest of honor Miller left the embassy with him. Recounting this episode for a tribute to Miller on his 80th birthday, Pinter concludes: "Being thrown out of the US embassy in Ankara with Arthur Miller — a voluntary exile — was one of the proudest moments in my life."[6] Pinter's experiences in Turkey and his knowledge of the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language "inspired" his 1988 play ''Mountain Language'' (Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 309–10; Gussow, ''Conversations with Pinter'' 67–68).
He is an active delegate of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign in the United Kingdom, an organization that defends Cuba, supports the government of Fidel Castro, and campaigns against the U.S. embargo on the country.Current information is available from the official website of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign in the UK, ''Hands Off Cuba!'', accessed 6 Sept. 2007. In 2001 Pinter joined the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević (ICDSM), which appealed for a fair trial for and the freedom of Slobodan Milošević; he signed a related "Artists' Appeal for Milošević" in 2004. (The organization continues its presence on the internet even after Milošević's death in 2006.)
He strongly opposed the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, the 2001 United States war in Afghanistan, and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. He has been very active in the current anti-war movement in the United Kingdom, speaking at rallies held by the Stop the War Coalition. He has called the President of the United States, George W. Bush, a "mass murderer" and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair, both "mass-murdering" and a "deluded idiot"; he alleges that they, along with past U.S. officials, are "war criminals". He has compared the Bush administration ("a bunch of criminal lunatics") with Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, saying that, under Bush, the United States ("a monster out of control") strives to attain "world domination" through "Full spectrum dominance", while, like a "bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain," led by Blair, participates in "an act of premeditated mass murder" instigated on behalf of "the American people", who, Pinter acknowledges, increasingly protest "their government's actions".[7] In March 2006, upon accepting the Europe Theatre Prize, the mostly-European audience applauded loudly as Pinter exhorted them "to resist the power of the United States," saying: "'I'd like to see Europe echo the example of Latin America in withstanding the economic and political intimidation of the United States. This is a serious responsibility for Europe and all of its citizens'" (Merritt, "Europe Theatre Prize Celebration"; Anderson; Pinter as qtd. in Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 427–28). As Billington reports, "His words went down a storm" (428).
He continues to sign petitions on behalf of artistic and political causes that he supports, and became a signatory of the mission statement of Jews For Justice For Palestinians in 2005 and of its full-page advertisement, "What Is Israel Doing? A Call by Jews in Britain" featured in ''The Times'' on 6 July 2006.[8] He also co-signed an open letter about recent events in the Middle East dated 19 July 2006, distributed to major news publications on 21 July 2006, and posted on the website of Noam Chomsky on 27 July 2006.[9]
On 5 February 2007, The Independent reports, along with historian Eric Hobsbawm, human rights lawyer Geoffrey Bindman, fashion designer Nicole Farhi, film director Mike Leigh, and actors Stephen Fry and Zoë Wanamaker, among others, Harold Pinter launched the organization Independent Jewish Voices in the United Kingdom "to represent British Jews … in response to a perceived pro-Israeli bias in existing Jewish bodies in the UK", and, according to Hobsbawn, "as a counter-balance to the uncritical support for Israeli policies by established bodies such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews" (Hodgson).
Pinter also contributes letters to the editor, essays, speeches, and poetry strongly expressing his artistic and political viewpoints, which are frequently published initially in British periodicals, both via print and online publishing and, increasingly, distributed and re-distributed extensively over the Internet and throughout the blogosphere. These have been distributed more widely since his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005; subsequent related news accounts often cite his status as a Nobel Laureate.
For over the past two decades, in his essays, speeches, interviews, and literary readings, Pinter has focused increasingly on political issues. Since the mid-eighties, he has described his earlier plays retrospectively from the perspective of the politics of power and the dynamics of oppression.
During his appearance at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 25 August 2006, for example, after reading an interrogation scene from ''The Birthday Party'', Pinter offered a rare "explanation": Pinter "wanted to say that Goldberg and McCann represented the forces in society who wanted to snuff out dissent, to stifle Stanley's voice, to silence him", and that in 1958, "'One thing [the critics who almost unanimously hated the play] got wrong … was the whole history of stifling, suffocating and destroying dissent. Not too long before, the Gestapo had represented order, discipline, family life, obligation — and anyone who disagreed with that was in trouble'" (Qtd. by McDowell).
In accepting the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry, on 18 March 2005, wondering "What would Wilfred Own make of the invasion of Iraq? A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the conception of international law?" and concluded: "I believe Wilfred Owen would share our contempt, our revulsion, our nausea and our shame at both the language and the actions of the [United States|American]] and British governments" (''Various Voices'' 247-48).
In both his writing and his public speaking, as McDowell observes,
Honors
Pinter was appointed CBE in 1966 and became a Companion of Honour in 2002 (having previously declined a knighthood in 1996). He accepted the 1995 David Cohen Prize for Literature, in recognition of a lifetime's achievement in literature and the 1996 Laurence Olivier Special Award for a lifetime's achievement in the theatre; became a BAFTA Fellow in 1997; and received a 2001 World Leaders Award for "Creative Genius", as the subject of a week-long "Homage" in Toronto, and the 2004 Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry—"in recognition of Pinter's lifelong contribution to literature, 'and specifically for his collection of poetry entitled ''War'', published in 2003'" (''Wilfred Owen Association Newsletter'') and the Europe Theatre Prize, in recognition of lifetime achievements pertaining to drama and theater (conferred March 2006).[10]
On 18 January 2007 BBC News announced that French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin presented Harold Pinter with one of his country's highest awards, the Légion d'honneur … at a ceremony at the French embassy in London, shortly after holding talks with Tony Blair" and that Prime Minister de Villepin "praised Mr Pinter's poem American Football (1991)," saying: "With its violence and its cruelty, it is for me one of the most accurate images of war, one of the most telling metaphors of the temptation of imperialism and violence"; "in return," Pinter "praised France for its opposition to the war in Iraq"; according to the BBC's Lawrence Pollard, "the award for the great playwright underlines how much Mr Pinter is admired in countries like France as a model of the uncompromising radical intellectual" ("French PM Honours Harold Pinter"; French Embassy in the UK). On 13 April 2007 the honorary Doctor of Letters was conferred on Harold Pinter by the University of Leeds in conjunction with a three-day conference and celebration marking the 50th anniversary of the first performance of his first play, ''The Room'' ("Pinter Honoured for a Lifetime’s Contribution to the Arts").[11]
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005
On 13 October 2005 the Swedish Academy announced that it had decided to award the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2005 to "Harold Pinter", "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms".[12]
When interviewed about his reaction to the Nobel Prize announcement by Billington, Pinter joked: "I was told today that one of the Sky channels said this morning that 'Harold Pinter is dead[.'] Then they changed their mind and said, 'No, he's won the Nobel prize.' So I've risen from the dead" (qtd. in Billington, comp., "'They've said …'").
Nobel Week, including the Nobel Prize Awards Ceremony in Stockholm and related events throughout Scandinavia, occurred early in December 2005. Due to concerns about his health, Pinter and his family could not attend the Awards Ceremony and related events of Nobel Week. After the Academy notified him of his award, he had arranged for his publisher (Stephen Page of Faber and Faber) to accept his Nobel Diploma and Nobel Medal at the Awards Ceremony scheduled for 10 December, but he had still planned to travel to Stockholm, to present his lecture in person a few days earlier (Honigsbaum). In November, however, he was hospitalized for a rare mouth infection, and his doctor barred such travel. While still hospitalized, Pinter went to a Channel Four studio to videotape his Nobel Lecture: "Art, Truth & Politics", which was projected on three large screens at the Swedish Academy on 7 December 2005 (Lyall).
The video was simultaneously broadcast, introduced by friend and fellow playwright David Hare, that evening on Channel Four in the UK as well. Subsequently, the full text and streaming video formats were posted for the public on the Nobel Prize and Swedish Academy official websites. These formats of Pinter's Nobel Lecture have been widely cited, quoted, and distributed by print and online media and the source of much commentary and debate.
Art, Truth & Politics: The Nobel Lecture
In his highly-controversial Nobel Lecture "Art, Truth & Politics", speaking with obvious difficulty while seated in a wheelchair, Pinter distinguishes between the search for truth in art and the avoidance of truth in politics.[13]
He describes his own artistic process of creating ''The Homecoming'' and ''Old Times'', following an initial line or word or image, calling "the author's position" an "odd one" as, experiencing the "strange moment … of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence", he must "play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek" during which "the search for the truth … has to be faced, right there, on the spot". Distinguishing among his plays ''The Birthday Party'', ''Mountain Language'', and ''Ashes to Ashes'', he segues into his transitions from "the search for truth" in art and "the entirely different set of problems" facing the artist in "Political theatre" to the avoidance of seeking "truth" in "power politics" (5–9).
He asserts: Charging the United States with having "supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War", leading to "hundreds of thousands of deaths", Pinter asks: "Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy?" Then he answers his own question: "The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it" (9–10).
Revisiting arguments from his political essays and speeches of the past decade, Pinter reiterates:
In imagery recalling his description of "speech" as "a constant stratagem to cover nakedness",
Pinter adds:
Toward the end of the lecture, after reading two poems referring to "blood in the streets", "deaths", "dead bodies", and "death" by fellow Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda and himself, in a whimsically-humble gesture, Pinter offers to "volunteer" for the "job" of "speech writer" for President George W. Bush, penning a ruthless message of fierce aggression masquerading as moral struggle of good versus evil yet finally proferring the "authority" of his (Bush's) "fist" (17–22).[14] Pinter demands prosecution of Tony Blair in the International Criminal Court, while pointing out, with irony, that he would do the same for George W. Bush if Bush had not so shrewdly refused to "ratify" that Court (18). Pinter concludes his Nobel Lecture with a call for "unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies" as "a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all", one which he regards as "in fact mandatory", for, he warns, "If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man" (23–24).
Public criticism
After the announcement that Pinter had won the Nobel Prize in Literature on 13 October 2005, and, increasingly, in response to his videotaped Nobel Lecture broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK, on 7 December 2005, and excerpted in reports published in print and online throughout the world, heated critical debate about Pinter spiked in the public media, spreading throughout the blogosphere, encompassing thousands of commentaries and focusing mostly on his "political activism", particularly his purported "anti-Americanism" and his generally-"Leftist" views.Early attention to the possibility of a "political element" in the awarding of Pinter's Nobel Prize appears in Neil Smith, "'Political element' to Pinter Prize?" ''BBC News'' 13 Oct. 2005 ("Last Updated: Thursday, 13 October 2005, 16:33 GMT 17:33 UK") and various accounts hyperlinked in the "Special Report" in ''The Guardian''.[15] Billington observes that "the reactions to Pinter's Nobel Prize and Lecture" were "fascinating" and "overwhelmingly positive," though he thinks "it is worth picking out the few negative ones" as examples. First of all, he points out, "The most startling fact was that Pinter's Nobel Lecture on 7 December was totally ignored by the BBC." He says, "You would have thought that a living British dramatist's views on his art and global politics might have been of passing interest to a public service broadcaster"; yet "There was ... no reference to the speech on any of BBC TV's news bulletins that night or indeed on its current affairs programme, ''Newsnight''" (''Harold Pinter'' 424). While "in the press [in the UK], there was also a handful of attacks on both the award and the Lecture," Billington dispatches criticisms by three of them: "the normally sensible Johan Hari," who "dismissed the Lecture in advance [of its broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK] as a 'rant' and falsely claimed that Pinter would have refused to resist Hitler"; "in fact," Billington stresses, Pinter "has repeatedly said that, had he been of age, he would have accepted conscription in World War II" (424-25). "More predictably," Billington continues, "Christopher Hitchens was wheeled out to dismiss Pinter as 'a bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long'" (425), and, finally, Billington cites the ''Daily Telegraph'' historian Niall Ferguson's having "attacked the Lecture," quoting in part Ferguson's statement that in his Nobel Lecture Pinter "'pretend[s] that [US] crimes were equivalent to those of its Communist opponents ...'": a distortion according to both Billington and Pinter: "he never made any comparison in his speech between atrocities committed by the Soviet Union and China and those of America. 'All I ever said,' he retorts, 'is that Soviet atrocities were comprehensively documented but that American actions weren't. I didn't go into comparisons as to who killed more people as if it were a contest. Ferguson distorted the whole bloody thing.' (Qtd. in Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 425) Billington also points out that the Harold Pinter Archive in the British Library contains "two large boxes containing the thousands of letters Pinter received from friends, colleagues, public eminences and total strangers applauding both the prize and his political stance" (425). The "Harold Pinter Community" Forum hosted on Pinter's official website illustrates further at times-contentious critical debate among its participants about Pinter's politics, though many congratulate him for having won the Nobel Prize, and many (though not all) support the views expressed in his Lecture and his other speeches and essays.
Interviews, media appearances, and productions after December 2005
In his first public appearance in Britain since he won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, Pinter participated in "Meet the Author" with Ramona Koval, at the Edinburgh Book Festival, in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the evening of 25 August 2006. Prior to the interview, Pinter read a scene from his play ''The Birthday Party''.
After returning to London from Edinburgh, in September 2006, Pinter began rehearsing for his performance of the role of Krapp in ''Krapp's Last Tape'', the one-man play by Samuel Beckett. This production, which occurred from 11 October, the day after Pinter's 76th birthday, to 21 October 2006, was part of the fiftieth-anniversary celebration season of the Royal Court Theatre, in London.[16] Prior to this Royal Court production, Pinter said: "It's a great challenge and I'm going to have a crack at it" (qtd. by Robinson, "I'm Written Out"). His performances sold out by the first day of general ticket sales (4 Sept. 2006). One performance was filmed and produced on DVD, and was shown on BBC Four on 21 June 2007.According to "BBC Four Listings" for Thursday, 21 June 2007, as accessed on 18 June 2007 (since updated).
On 18 August 2006 Sheffield Theatres announced ''Pinter: A Celebration'', to take place for a month from 11 October through 11 November 2006. The program featured selected productions of Pinter's plays (in order of presentation): ''The Caretaker'', ''Voices'', ''No Man's Land'', ''Family Voices'', ''Tea Party'', ''The Room'', ''One for the Road'' and ''The Dumb Waiter''; films (most his screenplays; some in which Pinter appears as an actor): ''The Go-Between'', ''Accident'', ''The Birthday Party'', ''The French Lieutenant's Woman'', ''Reunion'', ''Mojo'', ''The Servant'', ''The Pumpkin Eater''; and other related program events: "Pause for Thought" (Penelope Wilton and Douglas Hodge in conversation with Michael Billington), "Ashes to Ashes –– A Cricketing Celebration", a "Pinter Quiz Night", "The New World Order", the BBC2 documentary film ''Arena: Harold Pinter'' (introd. Anthony Wall, producer of ''Arena''), and "The New World Order –– A Pause for Peace" (a consideration of "Pinter's pacifist writing" [both poems and prose] supported by the Sheffield Quakers), and a screening of "Pinter's passionate and antagonistic 45-minute Nobel Prize Lecture."[17]
Most recently, Pinter wrote a new screenplay adaptation of the 1970 Tony Award-winning play ''Sleuth'', by Anthony Shaffer, for the recently-completed 2007 film Sleuth, directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Michael Caine (in the role of Andrew Wyke, originally played by Laurence Olivier) and Jude Law (in the role of Milo Tindle, originally played by Caine), who also produced it; scheduled for release on 12 October 2007, it debuted at the 64th Venice International Film Festival on 31 August 2007, and is being screened at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival on 10 September.
In March 2007, Charlie Rose had "A Conversation with Harold Pinter" on ''The Charlie Rose Show'', filmed at the Old Vic, in London, and broadcast on television in the United States on PBS.
A revival of ''The Hothouse'', directed by Ian Rickson, with a cast including Stephen Moore (Roote), Lia Williams (Miss Cutts), and Henry Woolf (Tubb), among others, opened at the Royal National Theatre, in London, in July 2007.For production details, please see "The Hothouse", ''Royal National Theatre'', accessed 15 June 2007 (features NT Video clip).
A Broadway revival of ''The Homecoming'', starring Ian McShane as Max, Raul Esparza as Lenny, Michael McKean as Sam, and Eve Best as Ruth, and directed by Daniel Sullivan, is "scheduled to begin rehearsals in October 2007", to begin previews on 23 November, and to open on 9 December 2007, for a "20-week limited engagement … through April 13, 2008" at the Cort Theatre (Gans).[18]
Pinter and Academia
Among his other honors, Pinter is the recipient of seventeen honorary degrees conferred by European and American academic institutions, as well as an Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) (1970)."Biography" at haroldpinter.org: "Honorary degrees from the Universities of Reading 1970; Birmingham 1971; Glasgow 1974; East Anglia 1974; Stirling 1979; Brown (Rhode Island) 1982; Hull 1986; Sussex 1990; East London 1994; Sofia (Bulgaria) 1995; Bristol 1998; Goldmiths, University of London 1999; University of Aristotle, Thessaloniki 2000; University of Florence, Italy, 2001; University of Turin, Italy, 2002; National University of Ireland, Dublin 2004; University of Leeds 2007." In 2006 Pinter was elected a "foreign member" of the Department of Language and Literature of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.He is listed as a member on the official website of the Serbian Academy: Members, accessed 6 Apr. 2007. He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Leeds School of English on 13 April 2007.
The Harold Pinter Society
In 1986, a group of American academic scholars formed the Harold Pinter Society (an Allied Organization of the MLA). The Pinter Society is international in membership and scope. Members and individual and institutional subscribers receive ''The Pinter Review: Collected Essays'', co-edited by Francis Gillen (University of Tampa) and Steven H. Gale (Kentucky State University) and published by the University of Tampa. At first an academic journal begun in 1987 and now a biennial book publication, each volume contains a bibliography of works, productions, and other events by and about Pinter compiled by Susan Hollis Merritt.The contents of each volume of ''The Pinter Review'' are listed in a section of Harold Pinter's official website hyperlinked on its home page called "Something extra" and in its periodically-updated "Current events" menu.
Artist and Citizen: 50 Years of Performing Pinter
150 px
Workshop Theatre, School of English, University of Leeds hosted "Artist and Citizen: 50 Years of Performing Pinter", a conference organized by Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies and Workshop Theatre director Mark Taylor-Batty, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first production of Harold Pinter's first play, ''The Room'', from 12 April to 14 April 2007 ("Pinter Honoured for a Lifetime’s Contribution to the Arts"). Guests included Harold Pinter and Henry Woolf, who reprised his original role as Mr. Kidd in a revival of that play and also his performance as the Man in ''Monologue''. During the conference, on 12 April 2007, the Belarus Free Theatre, of Minsk, Belarus, where their theatrical work is outlawed and censored and for which some of them have been imprisoned and "under attack" by the authorities, performed their work ''Being Harold Pinter'', introduced by "their patron", Sir Tom Stoppard, and, afterward, they participated in a post-performance discussion, with Harold Pinter, also in attendance (Hickling; Billington, "The Importance of Being Harold Pinter"; Batiukov; "Harold Pinter Meets Free Theatre in Leeds").[19] It was as part of this "celebration," on 13 April, that Pinter was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Leeds School of English.[20]The conference poster features the photograph of a portrait of Harold Pinter by artist Amy Shuckburgh, which was on display at the Workshop Theatre and has since been displayed at the Royal National Theatre (NT), during the run of ''The Hothouse'', dir. by Ian Rickson, and in other venues relating to productions of Pinter's works. As stated in the NT webpage on "Harold Pinter's portrait",
Amy Shuckburgh's portrait of Harold Pinter has been exhibited at Trafalgar Studios, London, during the run of Harold Pinter's play The Dumb Waiter and at 'Artist and Citizen: 50 Years of Performing Pinter', a conference held at Leeds University at which Harold Pinter received an honorary degree. The work has been reproduced in the programmes for The Dumb Waiter, the touring production of Old Times; Betrayal at the Donmar Warehouse; and The Hothouse at the National Theatre, London.
The Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing
Goldsmiths College, University of London, established the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing, inaugurated in June 2003, with Harold Pinter as Honorary President. It is "an interdisciplinary research centre, involving principally the Departments of English & Comparative Literature and of Drama, the latter organising and hosting the Centre, and with links in Media and Communications, Music, PACE and the Digital Studios". So far it has planned three conferences, "one on the work of Stephen Sondheim, and another on African Women Playwrights". Its third conference, Ravenhill 10, was a symposium on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the first production of Mark Ravenhill's play ''Shopping and Fucking'' (11–12 Nov. 2006). The Pinter Centre will sponsor additional conferences in the future, "including one on Black British Drama and a major conference in 2008 to be entitled, 'Pinter, Postmodernism and Contemporary Writing'".
''Harold Pinter: A Bibliographical History''
In 2005, ''Harold Pinter: A Bibliographical History'', compiled by William Baker and John C. Ross, was published by Oak Knoll Press in conjunction with the British Library. As a result of Pinter's winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, according to its publisher, the book became an academic "bestseller" ("Oak Knoll Press Bestsellers" 37).
Characteristics of Pinter's work
"Pinteresque"
"That [Harold Pinter] occupies a position as a modern classic is illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama: 'Pinteresque'", placing him in the company of authors considered unique or influential enough to elicit eponymous adjectives. Susan Harris Smith observes: "The term 'Pinteresque' has had an established place in the English language for almost thirty years. The ''OED'' defines it as 'of or relating to the British playwright, Harold Pinter, or his works'; thus, like a snake swallowing its own tail the definition forms the impenetrable logic of a closed circle and begs the tricky question of what the word specifically means" (103). The ''Online OED'' (2006) defines ''Pinteresque'' more explicitly: "Resembling or characteristic of his plays.… Pinter's plays are typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses."[21] The Swedish Academy defines characteristics of the ''Pinteresque'' in greater detail: Over the years Pinter himself has "always been very dismissive when people have talked about languages and silences and situations as being 'Pinteresque'", observes Kirsty Wark in their interview on ''Newsnight Review'' broadcast on 23 June 2006; she wonders, "Will you finally acknowledge there is such a thing as a 'Pinteresque' moment?" "No", Pinter replies, "I've no idea what it means. Never have. I really don't.… I can detect where a thing is 'Kafkaesque' or 'Chekhovian' [Wark's examples]," but with respect to the "Pinteresque", he says, "I can't define what it is myself. You use the term 'menace' and so on. I have no explanation of any of that really. What I write is what I write."
"The weasel under the cocktail cabinet"
Once asked what his plays are about, Pinter lobbed back a phrase "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet", which he regrets has been taken seriously and applied in popular criticism: Despite Pinter's protestations to the contrary, many reviewers and other critics still find that Pinter's "remark", though "facetious", is still an apt description of his plays. For example, "Asked what his plays were about, Harold Pinter once notoriously quipped, 'the weasel under the cocktail cabinet'.… Although Pinter later repudiated this remark as facetious, it does contain an important clue about his relationship to English dramatic tradition" (Sofer 29).
"Two silences": a "continual evasion" of "communication"
Among the most-commonly cited of Pinter's comments on his own work are his remarks about two kinds of silence ("two silences"), including his objections to "that tired, grimy phrase 'failure of communication'", as defined in his speech to the National Student Drama Festival in Bristol in 1962, incorporated in his published version of the speech entitled "Writing for the Theatre":
In his "Presentation Speech" of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature to Harold Pinter, in absentia, Swedish writer Per Wästberg, Member of the Swedish Academy and Chairman of its Nobel Committee, observes: "The abyss under chat, the unwillingness to communicate other than superficially, the need to rule and mislead, the suffocating sensation of accidents bubbling under the quotidian, the nervous perception that a dangerous story has been censored – all this vibrates through Pinter's drama."
The "Pinter pause"
One of the "two silences"–when Pinter's stage directions indicate ''pause'' and ''silence'' when his characters are not speaking at all–has become a "trademark" of Pinter's dialogue called the "Pinter pause": "During the 1960s, Pinter became famous–nay, notorious–for his trademark: 'The Pinter pause'" (Filichia). Actors and directors often find Pinter's "pauses and silences" to be daunting elements of performing his plays, leading to much discussion of them in theatrical and dramatic criticism, and actors who have worked with Pinter in rehearsals have "reported that he regretted ever starting to write 'Pause' as a stage direction, because it often leads to portentous overacting" (Jacobson). Speaking about their experiences of working with Pinter in rehearsing director Carey Perloff's 1989 double bill of ''The Birthday Party'' and ''Mountain Language'' (for Classic Stage Company), American actors David Strathairn and Peter Riegert agreed with Jean Stapleton that "Pinter's comments … 'freed' the cast from feeling reverential about his pauses," and, while Strathairn "believes pauses can be overdone," he also "thinks Pinter's are distinctive: 'The natural ones always seem to be right where he wrote them. His pause or beat comes naturally in the rhythm of the conversation. [As an actor, you] find yourself pausing in mid-sentence, thinking about what you just said or are going to say.…'" Perloff said: "He didn't want them weighted that much.…He kept laughing that everybody made such a big deal about it.' He wanted them honored, she said, but not as 'these long, heavy, psychological pauses, where people look at each other filled with pregnant meaning'" (Jacobson).
More recently, in an article elliptically headlined "Cut the Pauses …Says Pinter", a London ''Sunday Times'' television program announcement for Harry Burton's documentary film ''Working With Pinter'', Olivia Cole observes that he "made brooding silence into an art form, but after 50 years Harold Pinter has said directors should be free to cut his trademark pauses if they want.…" In ''Working With Pinter'' (shown on British television's ''More 4'' in February 2007), Cole writes, Pinter "says he has been misunderstood. He maintains that while others detected disturbing undertones, he merely intended basic stage directions" in writing "''pause''" and "''silence''". She quotes Pinter's remarks from ''Working With Pinter'':
Exemplifying the frequency and relative duration of pauses in Pinter's plays, Cole observes that "Pinter wrote 140 pauses into his work Betrayal, 149 into The Caretaker and 224 into The Homecoming. The longest are typically 10 seconds."
Pinter's having encouraged actors to "cut" his pauses and silences––with the important qualification "if they don't make any sense" (elided in Cole's headline)––has "bemused directors", according to Cole, who quotes Pinter's longtime friend and director Sir Peter Hall as saying "that it would be a 'failure' for a director or actor to ignore the pauses":
Cole concludes that Sir Peter added, however, that, in ''Working With Pinter'', Pinter "was right to criticise productions in which actors were fetishising their pauses".
Quoting J. Barry Lewis, the director of a recent production of ''Betrayal'', by Palm Beach Dramaworks, Lisa Cohen observes that Pinter has "even entered popular culture with what is called 'the Pinter pause,' a term that describes … those silent moments 'filled with unspoken dialogue' that occur throughout his plays".Cohen's comment appears in her review of this production, "J. Barry Lewis on 'Betrayal'", ''Edge'' (Ft. Lauderdale, Florida), ''edgeftlauderdale.com'', 1 Mar. 2007, accessed 6 Sept. 2007.Beau Higgins, in "A Pinter Play – 'Betrayal'", ''broadwayworld.com'', Mar. 2007, accessed 6 Sept. 2007, also reviews this production, which opened on 9 Mar. 2007 and ran through 15 Apr. 2007. Three other production revs. appear on the Palm Beach Dramaworks website; in one of them, Jan Sjostrom, "Dramaworks Stays True to Fine 'Betrayal'", ''Palm Beach Daily News'', 19 Mar. 2007, accessed 6 Sept. 2007, states: "The show is impeccably directed by J. Barry Lewis, who ensures that no scene is overplayed and every unspoken nuance is communicated. And there are plenty of nuances in this play. In fact, what's left unsaid is as important as the dialogue."
Allusions to Pinter in Anglo-American popular culture
A line in "The Ladies Who Lunch", a song in ''Company'', the 1970 Broadway musical by George Furth and Stephen Sondheim, alludes to "a Pinter play".[22]
Episode 164 of ''Seinfeld'' entitled "The Betrayal" is structured in reverse somewhat like Pinter's play and film ''Betrayal''; Jerry Seinfeld's comic parodic "tribute" to Harold Pinter, the episode features a character named "Pinter".[23]
A character in the fourth episode of the second season of ''Dawson's Creek'', "Tamara's Return" (28 Oct. 1998), alludes to Pinter's so-called "sub-textual" use of silence as "a classic 'Pinter' moment". In dialogue between lead character Pacey Witter (played by Joshua Jackson) and Tamara Jacobs (Leann Hunley), his former English teacher with whom Pacey has had an affair, Tamara tells Pacey that an awkward moment of silence between them is "what we ex-English teachers call a classic 'Pinter' moment, where everything is said in silence because the emotion behind what we really want to say is just too overwhelming. … silence is an acquired taste. The more complicated life becomes the better it is to learn to say nothing." When Pacey inquires "Who is this Pinter guy?" Tamara urges him, "Stay in school." Later Pacey tells Tamara that he has "looked up this Pinter guy. Harold, playwright, the king of subtext. You say one thing, but you mean another," wondering further: "Do you think it's possible for us to have a moment without all the subtext?" "Uh, I don't know, Pacey," Tamara replies. "Words have always gotten us into so much trouble." Pacey and Tamara finally agree that "This Pinter guy was really onto something."[24][25]
The song "Up Against It", from the album Bilingual, by the English electronic music/pop music duo Pet Shop Boys, includes the lines: "Such a cold winter/With scenes as slow as Pinter" (Tennant and Lowe).
Works
See also
★ Jewish left
Notes
1. For additional details, please see: Swedish Academy, Announcement (incl. links to video of official Nobel "Announcement", "Interview", and "Press Release"); Agencies, "Special Report": "'The foremost representative of British drama': Excerpts From the Swedish Academy's Citation Awarding the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature to British Playwright Harold Pinter", ''The Guardian Online'' 13 Oct. 2005.
2. See also Batty, "Chronology" in ''About Pinter''; Cf. Batty, comp., "Acting" and "Directing" sections of ''HaroldPinter.org''.
3. Cited by Merritt in "Sir Harold Hobson: The Promptings of Personal Experience", ''Pinter in Play'' 221–25. The entire review is accessible in the section on ''The Birthday Party'' (premiere) of ''HaroldPinter.org''; it includes the following often-quoted passage:
One of the actors in Harold Pinter[']s The Birthday Party at the Lyric, Hammersmith, announces in the programme that he read History at Oxford, and took his degree with Fourth Class Honours. Now I am well aware that Mr Pinter[']s play received extremely bad notices last Tuesday morning. At the moment I write these it is uncertain even whether the play will still be in the bill by the time they appear, though it is probable it will soon be seen elsewhere. Deliberately, I am willing to risk whatever reputation I have as a judge of plays by saying that The Birthday Party is not a Fourth, not even a Second, but a First; and that Pinter, on the evidence of his work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London.… Mr Pinter and The Birthday Party, despite their experiences last week, will be heard of again. Make a note of their names.
4. "Comedy of menace" is also a verbal pun on "Comedy of manners" (said with a Jewish accent), as discussed in Merritt, ''Pinter in Play'' 225–26.
5. Details of the Olivier Theatre production are archived at National Theatre, London, Feb. 2001, accessed 2 Sept. 2007.
6. Qtd. from Harold Pinter,"Arthur Miller's Socks", posted in "Campaigning Against Torture" at ''HaroldPinter.org'' and rpt. in Harold Pinter, ''Various Voices'' (rev. ed., 2005) 56–57.
7. Harold Pinter, public reading from ''War'', as qtd. by Chrisafis and Tilden; Pinter's remarks to the mass peace protest demonstration held on 15 February 2003, in London, published in ''haroldpinter.org'' as "Speech at Hyde Park": "The United States is a monster out of control. Unless we challenge it with absolute determination American barbarism will destroy the world. The country is run by a bunch of criminal lunatics, with Blair as their hired Christian thug. The planned attack on Iraq is an act of premeditated mass murder"; and Pinter's 2005 Nobel Lecture, "Art, Truth & Politics": "Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force… yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish." Not in Our Name and Not in My Name (nimn.org), "a predominantly Jewish peace group that was founded in November 2000 to organize opposition to the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem," is also a slogan used by the UK Stop the War Coalition, in whose anti-war protests and rallies Pinter has participated.
8. "About Jews For Justice For Palestinians" features its mission statement and links to a PDF file of the ad.
9. Cf. "What's New", ''Chomsky.info'' and "Letter from Pinter, Saramago, Chomsky and Berger"; both accessed 25 July 2006. The letter was signed first by John Berger, Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter, and José Saramago and "later endorsed" by Tariq Ali, et al. Cf. "Palestinian Nation under Threat", The Independent 21 July 2006, accessed 26 Aug. 2006. See also Noam Chomsky, "Comments on Dershowitz", ZNet 6 Sept. 2006, accessed 7 Sept. 2006, preceding the quoted text of a reply to the letter by Alan Dershowitz.
10. For information about the 10th Edition of the Europe Theatre Prize, presented to Harold Pinter, see its official website, Europe Theatre Prize--X Ed. (8–12 Mar. 2006), featuring its "Letter of Motivation".
11. More fully-complete lists of Pinter's many other awards, including honorary degrees from universities around the world, appear in the section on Pinter's "Biography", posted online at his official website ''HaroldPinter.org'' and in published chronologies of his career listed in the Nobel Prize "Biobibliographical Notes", notably: Baker and Ross; Gordon (ed.), ''Pinter at 70''; and Merritt (comp.), "Harold Pinter Bibliography"; and the webpages of The Harold Pinter Society. Updates are generally listed on ''HaroldPinter.org''.
12. Qtd. in press release, Nobel Prize official website, ''nobelprize.org'', 13 Oct. 2005, accessed 17 Aug. 2007. The press release accompanied its recorded press conference. (Audio and video streaming media files of the press conference and related interviews are accessible on the official websites of the Nobel Prize and the Swedish Academy.)
13. "Art, Truth & Politics", Pinter's Nobel Lecture, is posted online on the official website of the Nobel Prize, ''nobelprize.org''. (Subsequent parenthetical references to the Faber and Faber publication, ''Art, Truth & Politics'', appear in the text.)
14. The Newsnight broadcast featuring Kirsty Wark's interview of Pinter on 23 June 2006 presents a video clip of his subsequent reading of "Bush's speech" before a later audience in London.
15. As a sample of other published accounts, see also, e.g., articles by Allen-Mills, Anderson, Billington, Chrisafis and Tilden, Eden and Walker, Hitchens, McDowell, Riddell, Neil Smith, and Traub. Pinter has replied to such criticism in his post-Nobel Prize interviews with Billington, Koval, Moss, Rose, and Wark, among others; Paul Bond, Donald Freed, David Hare, John Pilger, Tom Stoppard, and others have defended Pinter's self-admittedly controversial views and the artistic integrity of his work against widespread critical assaults.
16. Hyperlinks to the official website for the 2006 Edinburgh Book Festival (now archived on the site); the production announcement for ''Krapp's Last Tape'', as well as "Upcoming events for the year 2006", were featured on the home page of ''HaroldPinter.org'' but that feature has since been updated.
17. The program appears in "Latest News: August 2006: Sheffield Theatres Presents Pinter: A Celebration", ''sheffieldtheatres.co.uk'' 18 Aug. 2006, accessed 28 Sept. 2006.
18. Other recent and "upcoming events" (updated periodically) are listed on the home page of Pinter's official website and through its menu of links to the "Calendar".
19. Upon the recommendations of Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Václav Havel, and Arthur Kopit, in April 2007, the Belarus Free Theatre became a recognized member of the European Theatre Convention: "ETC Members: Svobodnyi Teatr/ Le Théâtre libre de Minsk", accessed 31 Aug. 2007; "Presentation of the European Theatre Prizes in Thessaloniki: Belarus Free Theatre becomes a member of European Theatrical Convention (ETC) and is nominated for Europe Awards – the most prestigious European theatrical prize", press release, ''Free Theatre of Belarus'', 5 May 2007, accessed 31 Aug. 2007.
20. Further information about "Artist and Citizen: 50 years of Performing Pinter" is accessible on the University of Leeds conference website, as listed in the webpages of the Harold Pinter Society, where the program is announced in Events: Pinter Society Events.
21. Another version of the ''OED'' is cited in the BBC press release about ''Pinter at the BBC'' (10 Oct. 2002): "[']Pinteresque pin-ter-esk', adj. in the style of the characters, situations, etc., of the plays of Harold Pinter, 20th-cent. English dramatist, marked esp. by halting dialogue, uncertainty of identity, and air of menace." The "Draft Revision" (June 2005) of this entry in the ''Oxford English Dictionary Online'' (2006) is:
Pinteresque, adj. (and n.)
Brit. /pntrsk/, U.S. /pn(t)rsk/ [< the name of Harold Pinter (b. 1930), British playwright + -ESQUE suffix. Cf. PINTERISH adj.]
Of or relating to Harold Pinter; resembling or characteristic of his plays. Also occas. as n. Pinter's plays are typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses.
22. Merritt, "Contingencies of Value Judgments of Pinter's Plays", chap. 9 of ''Pinter in Play'' 217–18 observes:
… by the early seventies Pinter had entered the curricula of British, American, and West German postsecondary, secondary, and even elementary schools (fueled, in Germany, by the Esslins' translations).… by 1978 they were being read and taught all over the world. Pinter had even entered American "popular culture" through references to "a Pinter play" and "Pinter heroines" in songs and other plays and movies (e.g., "The Ladies Who Lunch", from Stephen Sondheim's musical ''Company'' [1970], and Neil Simon's ''California Suite'' [1978] and a series of parodies, most recently Maximilian Bocek's ''Very Nearly a Pinter'' [pronounced with a long ''i'']). As well as being anthologized and published and parodied, they are still produced often; they remain a staple in professional theaters all over the world, and, at least in America, in regional, community, and academic theaters as well; throughout England [in the late '80s, over a decade prior to the 2005 Nobel Prize] they are produced less frequently.Merritt goes on to itemize then-recent revivals of Pinter's plays throughout England, Ireland, (then still) West Germany, speculating, prophetically it turned out, that "Recent events in Germany and Eastern Europe would seem to be enhancing Pinter's 'relevance.'"
23. For production details, see .
24. Season Two, Episode #204: "Tamara's Return", as listed in the official ''Episode Guide'' for ''Dawson's Creek'', ''dawsonscreek.com'', copyright © 2007 Sony Pictures Digital, features a video link to different part of the same episode. There are no official scripts on that site. Unofficial transcripts containing this dialogue are posted online at derivative fansites like ''TVTwiz.com'' and ''Dawson's Creek'' "Script Archive".
25. A discussion of critical controversies about Pinter's presumed use of "subtext" appears in "Some Other Language Games", chap. 7 in Merritt, ''Pinter in Play'' 137–70.
Selected bibliography
External links
★ "Harold Pinter". ''The Artists Network of Refuse & Resist!'' 12 Dec. 2005. (17 pages.) A selection of writings by and commentary about Pinter.
★ .
★ "Harold Pinter". ''Contemporary Writers.'' Biography and critical account by Michael Billington for British Council: Arts.
★ "Harold Pinter". ''Literary Encyclopedia''. Biography and critical account by Andrew Wyllie, University of the West of England.
★ "Harold Pinter (1930– )". Books: The Authors.'' Guardian Unlimited''. (Hyperlinked account.)
★ "Harold Pinter (1930– )". ''Books and Writers''. Biography and critical account. ''Authors' Calendar''. (Featured Nobel Prize in Literature winner for 2005.)
★ "Harold Pinter (1930– )". Brief biography, critical account, and selected bibliography compiled by Roger Phillip Mellor. ''Encyclopedia of British Film''. Links to filmography ("Film and TV Credits") and featured films. ''ScreenOnline'' at the British Film Institute (BFI).
★ The Harold Pinter Society. An Allied Organization of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and an Associated Organization of the Midwest Modern Language Association (M/MLA).
★ "Listmania: Harold Pinter: Winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature: A Listmania! list by Amazon.com Bookstore".
★ "The Nobel Prize Medal for Literature" ("Registered trademark of the Nobel Foundation") at ''nobelprize.org''.
★ The Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing, Goldsmiths College, University of London.
★ Pinter's works currently published by Grove Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. (US publisher).
★ "Short Bibliography" of Pinter's works currently published by Faber and Faber (UK publisher).
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