Harold Pinter

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	Photo: © Jill Furmanovsky

Biography

Playwright Harold Pinter was born in Hackney, London, on 10 October 1930. He was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and Central School of Speech and Drama.

His plays include The Room (1957), The Birthday Party (1958), The Dumb Waiter (1959), The Caretaker (1960), The Lover (1962), The Homecoming (1965), No Man's Land (1975), Mountain Language (1988), Moonlight (1993), Ashes to Ashes (1996) and Celebration (2000), first performed with The Room at the Almeida Theatre in London. His adaptation of Marcel Proust's novel Remembrance of Things Past was performed at the National Theatre in London in 2000. He adapted many of his stage plays for radio and television and he wrote the screenplays to a number of films including The Servant (1963), The Quiller Memorandum (1965), The Go-Between (1970), The Last Tycoon (1974) and The Comfort of Strangers (1989), adapted from Ian McEwan's novel. He directed many productions of his own plays as well as plays by other writers, including James Joyce, Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, David Mamet and Simon Gray, and acted on stage, film, television and radio.

He was awarded a CBE in 1966, the German Shakespeare Prize in 1970, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1973 and the David Cohen British Literature Prize in 1995, and held honorary degrees from the Universities of Reading, Glasgow, East Anglia and Bristol, among others. In 2001 he was awarded the S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award by the English Centre of International PEN. War (2003), is a collection of eight poems and one speech inspired by the subject of conflict.

Harold Pinter was married to the writer Lady Antonia Fraser and lived in London. In 2005, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in December 2008.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Drama, Poetry, Screenplay

Bibliography

The Room   Faber and Faber, 1957

The Birthday Party   Eyre Methuen, 1960

The Caretaker   Faber and Faber, 1960

A Slight Ache and Other Plays   Methuen, 1961

The Dumb Waiter   Samuel French, 1961

The Collection   (with 'The Lover')   Methuen, 1963

The Lover   Samuel French, 1963

The Homecoming   Methuen, 1965

Tea Party and Other Plays   Methuen, 1967

Mac   Pendragon Press, 1968

Landscape   (with 'Silence')   Methuen, 1969

Old Times   Methuen, 1971

No Man's Land   Methuen, 1975

Plays 1   (Contents: The Birthday Party; The Room; The Dumb Waiter; A Slight Ache)   Methuen, 1976

Plays 2   (Contents: The Caretaker; The Dwarfs; The Collection; The Lover)   Methuen, 1977

Betrayal   Methuen, 1978

Plays 3   (Contents: The Homecoming; Tea Party; The Basement; Landscape; Silence; That's Your Trouble; That's All; The Applicant; Interview; Dialogue for Three; Night)   Methuen, 1978

The Proust Screenplay   Methuen, 1978

The Hothouse   Methuen, 1980

Family Voices   Faber and Faber, 1981

The French Lieutenant's Woman and Other Screenplays   Methuen, 1982

One for the Road   Methuen, 1984

100 Poems by 100 Poets: An Anthology   (co-editor with Geoffrey Godbert and Anthony Astbury)   Methuen, 1986

Collected Poems and Prose   Methuen, 1986

Mountain Language   Faber and Faber, 1988

The Dwarves   Faber and Faber, 1990

The Comfort of Strangers and Other Screenplays   Faber and Faber, 1990

Party Time   Faber and Faber, 1991

Plays 4   (Contents: Monologue; Family Voices; One For the Road; Old Times; No Man's Land/ Betrayal/ A Kind of Alaska; Victoria Station; Mountain Language - revised 1981 edition)   Faber and Faber, 1991

Ten Early Poems   Greville Press, 1992

Moonlight   Faber and Faber, 1993

The Trial   (adapted from the novel by Franz Kafka)   Faber and Faber, 1993

99 Poems in Translation   (co-editor)   Faber and Faber, 1994

Ashes to Ashes   Faber and Faber, 1996

Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-1998   (revised and updated edition 'Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-2005'; 2006)   Faber and Faber, 1998

Celebration   (with 'The Room')   Methuen, 2000

Collected Screenplays 1   Faber and Faber, 2000

Collected Screenplays 2   Faber and Faber, 2000

War   Faber and Faber, 2003

Read about books by Harold Pinter at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Harold Pinter at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1962   Italia Prize   The Lover

1966   CBE

1970   Shakespeare Prize (Germany)

1973   Austrian State Prize for European Literature

1979   Laurence Olivier/BBC Award for Best New Play   Betrayal

1979   SWET Award   Betrayal

1980   Pirandello Prize

1982   Donatello Prize

1982   Giles Cooper Award   Family Voices

1984   Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Arts and Letters

1990   Companion of Literature   (Royal Society of Literature)

1995   David Cohen British Literature Prize

1996   Laurence Olivier Special Award

1997   Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence

2000   Critics' Circle Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts

2001   Hermann Kesten Medallion   (awarded for outstanding commitment on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers by German P.E.N.)

2001   PEN/S.T. Dupont Golden Pen Award   (Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature' award)

2001   Premio Fiesole ai Maestri del Cinema (Italy)

2001   South Bank Show Outstanding Achievement in the Arts Award

2001   World Leaders Award (Canada)

2002   Companion of Honour

2004   Critics' Circle Special 50th Year Award   (playwright)

2004   Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry   War

2005   Nobel Prize for Literature

2006   Europe Theatre Prize

2006   Franz Kafka Award

2007   Legion d'Honneur (France)

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Critical Perspective

Harold Pinter achieved the ultimate distinction for a living dramatist. He spawned his own adjective: 'Pinteresque'. It is generally applied to a situation fraught with menace in which common speech camouflages a ferocious battle for territory. But there is much more to Pinter than masked conflict and hidden threat. His pervading theme is memory: the way our existence is haunted by a recollection, however fallible or imaginary, of some vanished world in which everything was secure, certain and fixed. Pinter began his career as a repertory actor and occasional poet published in small magazines. Acting gave him an insight into the practicalities of stagecraft: poetry taught him about the precise placement of words. Both skills were evident in his short first play, The Room (1957): a highly effective piece about a reclusive heroine whose space is invaded by a succession of visitors climaxing in a blind Negro who bears a message calling on her to return home. The basic pattern was repeated, with fascinating variations, in Pinter's first full-length stage-play, The Birthday Party (1960). In this case the truculent hero, Stanley, has hidden away in dingy seaside digs from which he is forcibly removed by two visitors, Goldberg and McCann, who represent an unnamed organisation. In Stanley's recollections of his days as a concert pianist, you hear the characteristic Pinter note: a yearning for some lost Eden as a refuge from the uncertain present. But the play is also clearly a political metaphor for the oppression of the individual by the state; and it's no accident that Pinter had himself earlier risked imprisonment for conscientious objection. Pinter's early fascination with politics was also evident in The Hothouse(1980), a bilious black comedy set in a state-run hospital in which nonconformists are classified as mental patients. Written in 1958, it was never publicly performed till 1980. It was only with The Caretaker (1960) that Pinter finally achieved personal fame and commercial success. What everyone seized on, in this story of a tramp who accepts shelter from a brain-damaged benefactor and then tries to play him off against his smarter brother, was the verisimilitude of the dialogue: this was the language of the bus-queue or the cheap 'caff', with its pauses, repetitions and hidden desires, raised to the level of poetry. Yet it is also an acutely observant play about power and pipe dreams: about the desire for domination and about the human need for illusions. Which is presumably why to this day it is still performed all over the world.

Pinter's immaculate ear for dialogue led to him writing an impressive trio of 1960s films - The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between - all directed by Joseph Losey. But it was The Homecoming (1965) that confirmed his supremacy amongst his generation of stage-dramatists. It is a deeply disturbing play about Ruth, the wife of an academic, who opts to stay with her crude, aggressive in-laws rather than return with her husband to the sterile life of an American campus. What shocked people was both Ruth's apparent complicity in the family's desire that she should support them through prostitution and the absence of any conventional moral framework. But Ruth is more manipulator than victim who negotiates her homecoming very much on her own terms. And Pinter's refusal to moralise is part of what made him distinctive as a dramatist: his plays, for the most part, are pieces of social evidence, which he leaves us to interpret or resolve. Pinter revolutionised dramatic language through his use of demotic speech. But just as important was his banishment of authorial omniscience: the idea that the writer knows everything there is to know about his characters from start to finish.

After The Homecoming, however, Pinter's work underwent a formal change. He dispensed with the impedimenta of realism, such as exits and entrances, to present us with more distilled works that deal with his recurrent themes: time, memory, the power of the past over the present. In Old Times (1971) Deeley and Anna battle for possession of Kate: Deeley's wife and Anna's best friend. But their chosen weapon is reminiscence: even who saw the film of Odd Man Out with whom becomes a crucial tactic. And, at one point, Anna gnomically expresses the play's governing idea: 'There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened. There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place.' In the still more complex No Man's Land (1975) - easily Pinter's bleakest play - we witness an extraordinary encounter between a wealthy immured writer, Hirst, who seems tormented and crippled by the past and a Bohemian butterfly, Spooner, who has no fixed identity but who simply re-invents himself as he goes along. And in Betrayal (1978) Pinter reverses conventional chronology to explore the multiple deceptions involved in a triangular relationship: far from being a simple adultery-play, it is really about the endlessly corrosive nature of betrayal which infects lovers' trust, male friendship, youthful idealism and even one's sense of self.

Accused sometimes of retreating into private worlds, Pinter from the mid-1980s onwards answered his critics and expressed his sense of moral outrage with a series of pungent, political plays dealing with abuse of human rights. One For The Road (1984) demonstrates how torturers invoke God and country in order to justify their actions. Mountain Language (1988) depicts victimisation through suppression of language. Ashes to Ashes (1996) moves outwards from a man's interrogation of a woman about her lover to admit the Holocaust. But although these plays may lhave looked like a move into new territory for Pinter, they in fact marked a return to the political preoccupations that haunt his early work. Even the teaming of Pinter's play, Celebration (2000), with his earliest work, The Room, emphasised the unity of his sensibility and constancy of his obsessions. Set in a smart London restaurant, Celebration ostensibly satirises the coarse, crude materialism of a group of posh diners: the joker in the pack is a young Waiter who eavesdrops on the clients' conversations and uses them as a starting-point for his own fantasies about his grandfather. But once again Pinter uses memory not just as a dramatic device but as a key to understanding. The diners live in a world of instant gratification. The Waiter's memories of his grandfather evoke a world of familial closeness and natural beauty that is totally alien to the sex-obsessed diners. In 1957 Pinter set his first play in a dingy bedsit. 43 years later his chosen milieu was a swank restaurant. Yet, although the context may have been radically changeable, Pinter's obsessions remained very much what they always were, the hidden poetry of vernacular speech, the unfathomable mystery of human existence and the power of memory, however fallible, to convey the paradise we have all lost.

Michael Billington, 2002

For an in-depth critical review see Harold Pinter by Mark Batty (Northcote House, 2001: Writers and their Work Series).

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Further reading on this site

Pinter wins Nobel Prize
The Swedish Academy awarded this year’s Nobel prize for Literature to the British playwright, author and poet, Harold Pinter October 2005. The Academy, which has handed out the prize since... more...   (17/10/2005)

Cambridge Seminar
The Cambridge Seminar takes place every two years. It was last held over a week in mid-July 2009. The British Council's Cambridge Seminar on contemporary literature has influenced discussion, performance... more...   (30/06/2003)

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Faber and Faber Ltd 3 Queen Square London  WC1N 3AU Tel: +44 (0) 20 7465 0045 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7465 0034 E-mail: gapublicity@faber.co.uk http://www.faber.co.uk

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Related links

http:/ / www.haroldpinter.org

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