Harold Pinter: Innovator of British Theatre and Political Activist

Questo appunto di Letteratura Inglese riguarda il drammaturgo e poeta britannico Harold Pinter. A seguire si presenterà la sua figura, si riassumerà la sua biografia e si elencheranno le sue opere più significative, illustrandone le caratteristiche principali.

Harold Pinter: introduction

Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. He was one of the most innovative and influential contemporary British playwrights. He is best known for his enigmatic and deceptive "comedies of menace" and for his paradoxical use of words which, instead of facilitating communication, reveal men's silence and solitude. In 2005 he received the Nobel Prize in literature, because in his plays he “uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”. His most famous plays include “The Birthday Party” (1957), “The Homecoming” (1964) and “Betrayal” (1978), which were all adapted for the screen by Pinter himself. He also adapted others’ works, such as “The Servant” (1963), “The Go-Between” (1971), “The French Lieutenant's Woman” (1981), “The Trial” (1993) and “Sleuth” (2007). Besides, Pinter worked in radio, television and film productions of his own and other authors’ works.

What is Harold Pinter's life like?

Harold Pinter was born in London in 1930. His father was a Jewish tailor. The family, who were not wealthy, lived in the East End, a working-class district of London, where hardship and poverty were part of the normal way of life. He spent his childhood amid the misery of the great economic depression of the 1930s, followed by the violence and danger of the Second World War, during which the East End suffered severe damage from enemy bombing raids. Pinter won a scholarship to attend RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), but he left the course after two terms. At the age of 18 he was called up for compulsory military service, but resisted enlistment on the grounds that he was a conscientious objector: he was tried twice and eventually fined. He then devoted himself to writing, producing poetry and plays. He finally returned to acting (in 1954 he assumed the stage name of David Baron), and worked for several years in various provincial theaters. His first play was the one-act piece “The Room” (1957), but his work was neglected until 1960, when the production of “The Caretaker” made his reputation. From then onwards, he produced a number of significant plays, some of which have also been turned into films. In his works, he denounced injustice and political oppression. Pinter received numerous awards, the most important of which was the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature. He turned down a knighthood from Prime Minister John Major, since it came from a conservative government. In the political field, he campaigned against NATO activity in Kosovo. Fiercely anti-Bush and anti-Blair, he harshly criticized the US-led war in Iraq, which he denounced in a volume of poetry, “War” (2003). In early 2005, in a radio interview, he declared that, after writing 29 plays and 25 scripts, he was retiring as a dramatist in favour of political activism and writing poetry. In 2007 he received the Légion d'Honneur, France's highest civil honor. Pinter died on Christmas Eve 2008.

Harold Pinter: works

Pinter made his debut as an playwright with the one-act play “The Room” (1957), which already had many characteristics of later works: a situation of normality that gradually turns into a condition of dark menace and terror, depicted through subtle and allusive dialogue in which everyday language is used to create an eerie and enigmatic atmosphere. Included in this "theater of menace" are works such as the play “The Birthday Party” (1958), the one-act play “The Dumb Waiter” (1960), the radio plays “A Slight Ache” (1959) and “A Night Out” (1960), and the television script “Night School” (1960). Pinter elaborated a more and more refined portrayal of everyday ambiguity, with plays (“The Homecoming”, 1965; “Silence”, 1969; “Old Times”, 1971; “No Man's Land”, 1975; “Betrayal”, 1978), radio plays (“Landscape”, 1968; “Family Voices”, 1981) and texts for television (“The Dwarfs”, 1960, an adaptation of a novel he wrote when he was young and published only in 1990; “The Collection”, 1961; “The Lover”, 1963; “Tea Party”, 1965; “The Basement”, 1967; “Monologue”, 1973). After a series of one-acts (“A Kind of Alaska”, 1982; “Victoria Station”, 1982; “One for the Road”, 1984; “Mountain Language”, 1988) often marked by a more explicit political commitment, Pinter returned to the themes and atmospheres of his major dramas with “Moonlight” (1993), which was followed by “Ashes to Ashes” (1996); “Celebration” (1999) and “Remembrance of Things Past” (2000). Parallel to his work as a playwright, which made him a prominent figure in the world theater scene, Pinter was a screenwriter. For the cinema, drawing inspiration from his favorite authors (Sergei M. Ejzenštejn, Marcel Carné and Luis Buñuel), he soon developed a personal style, proving to be a refined and skillful interpreter of literary works. Pinter also wrote short stories and poems (“Poems and Prose” 1949-1977, 1978; “Collected Poems and Prose”, 1986; pacifist-inspired “War”, 2003). Moreover, he was an actor: he starred in J. Butterworth's “Mojo” (1997) and J. Boorman's “The tailor of Panama” (2001), among others. His work has been largely translated and performed in Italy.
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