By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 26, 2008
Harold Pinter, who was widely esteemed as the most important British playwright of the past half-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005, died Dec. 24 of cancer in London. He was 78.
Mr. Pinter, who wrote more than 30 plays, was known for creating dramatic worlds marked by despair, menace and a sense of psychic helplessness. His groundbreaking plays, including "The Birthday Party," "The Caretaker" and "The Homecoming," typically used just a few characters locked in anxious conversation to convey a sense of mysterious dread, doubt and ambiguity on many levels.
Plots were secondary to Mr. Pinter, and his dramas seldom reached a clear resolution. Instead, he built a profound sense of inner tension and psychological terror from hesitant, disjointed lines of dialogue broken by long silences.
His plays often had an implied political message, but in later years Mr. Pinter made his views more explicit. He used his Nobel acceptance speech to denounce the U.S. invasion of Iraq and to call then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair "a deluded idiot."
"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?" Mr. Pinter said of the invasion.
Many commentators were incensed. Christopher Hitchens lambasted Mr. Pinter's selection as "the almost complete degradation of the Nobel racket," and conservative critic Roger Kimball called it "not only ridiculous but repellent."
In the theater, however, Mr. Pinter's stature was beyond dispute. He made his biggest impact in the 1950s and 1960s, when his plays represented a jolting departure from the quaint drawing-room comedies and darkly realistic dramas that had been the opposite poles of British theater.
Mr. Pinter's works, which bore the influence of the existential dramatist Samuel Beckett and the modernist poet T.S. Eliot, explored such themes as sexual frustration, jealousy, loneliness and an overriding if indistinct sense of fear. The social or mental balance of his characters -- and, by extension, society as a whole -- was often undercut by a biting, sardonic humor.
"Words are weapons that the characters use to discomfort or destroy each other," Peter Hall, who frequently directed Mr. Pinter's plays, once said.
In his first full-length play, "The Birthday Party," which debuted in 1958, Mr. Pinter placed a man named Stanley at a seaside rooming house. Two mysterious strangers who had been searching for Stanley show up to throw a birthday party for him, but by the end of the play, they have inflicted psychic wounds on Stanley before seizing him and taking him away to an unknown fate.
The initial reviews were scathing -- Mr. Pinter called it "a mammoth flop, a flop d'estime" -- and the play closed in a week. One reviewer said it "will be best enjoyed by those who believe that obscurity is its own reward."
Only Harold Hobson, the influential critic of the London Times, saw merit in the play, and his review might have saved Mr. Pinter's fledgling career.
"Mr. Pinter, on the evidence of this work," he wrote, "possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London."
By the time of the 1960 premiere of Mr. Pinter's second major play, "The Caretaker," about two brothers who take in a homeless man who exerts a strange control over them, he was universally hailed as the brightest young playwright in Britain. The term "Pinteresque" came to describe the grim, alienated worldview of his plays, even if few critics could agree on their exact meaning.
Mr. Pinter resisted all efforts to give his dramas a fixed interpretation, preferring to let his cryptic dialogue speak for itself.
"I don't make judgments about my own work, and I don't analyze it," he said. "I just let it happen."
Harold Pinter was born Oct. 10, 1930, in London's East End, where his father was a tailor and dressmaker. Some critics have attributed the sense of terror in Mr. Pinter's later work to the anti-Semitism he faced growing up and to the London Blitz of World War II, which left parts of his neighborhood in rubble.
In his youth, Mr. Pinter set school records as a sprinter and was an excellent cricket and squash player. He wrote poetry and studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and registered as a conscientious objector at age 18. He spent the 1950s as an actor touring the British provinces under the stage name David Baron.
He continued to act occasionally throughout his life and appeared in several films, including "Mansfield Park" and "The Tailor of Panama." Two years ago in London, he performed Samuel Beckett's one-man play "Krapp's Last Tape."
Many top actors vied to appear in Mr. Pinter's plays over the years, and in the production of "No Man's Land" (1975), the roles of a poor poet and his patron were played by stage giants John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson.
The play closed with lines that could be emblematic of many of Mr. Pinter's bleak, isolating themes: "You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever icy and silent."
After a long pause, the other character says, "I'll drink to that."
Mr. Pinter used what one critic called his "clinically accurate ear for the absurdity of everyday speech" to make audiences squirm with his unflinching portrayal of disquieting scenes. In "The Homecoming," first produced in 1965, a professor brings a new wife home to meet his father and brothers. By the end of the play, she leaves him to stay behind with the other men in the family.
The 1978 play "Betrayal" (later made into a film starring Jeremy Irons) depicted a marriage breaking up under the weight of affairs. It came at a time when Mr. Pinter was caught up in a notorious scandal with Lady Antonia Fraser, a historian and biographer. She left her husband, a member of Parliament, to live with Mr. Pinter, who was not yet divorced from his first wife, actress Vivien Merchant.
He and Fraser were married in 1980 and formed a happy household with her six children from her previous marriage. All of them, as well as 17 grandchildren, survive Mr. Pinter. His son from his first marriage, Daniel, changed his last name to Brand and broke off all contact with his father more than 20 years ago.
In addition to his work as a playwright, Mr. Pinter often directed his own plays and those of other dramatists. He also wrote more than 20 screenplays, including "The Pumpkin Eater" (1964), with Anne Bancroft; "The Go-Between" (1971), with Julie Christie and Alan Bates; "The Last Tycoon" (1976), an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel about Hollywood; and "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981), based on the John Fowles novel.
He also wrote an unproduced screenplay of Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," as well as a 1993 adaptation of "The Trial" by Franz Kafka, who is often cited as one of Mr. Pinter's literary forebears.
Mr. Pinter exerted a powerful influence on a generation of playwrights, including Tom Stoppard and David Hare in England and Sam Shepard and David Mamet in the United States.
"The essence of his singular appeal is that you sit down to every play or film he writes in certain expectation of the unexpected," Hare once said.
Mr. Pinter worked quickly -- he wrote his first play in four days -- but admitted that he didn't know where he found his inspiration.
"I've never been able to sit down and say, 'Now I'm going to write a play,' " he said in 1976. "I just have no alternative but to wait for the thing to be released within me."