Harold Pinter
British playwright, poet, actor, director
Plays & Poetry
Harold Pinter is known as one of the most prominent British playwrights of the late twentieth century.
Biography
Sources:
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The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, Michael Billington.
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Harold Pinter was born in Hackney, London on October 10, 1930, the only child of Jack and Frances Pinter. He grew up with a large extended family. From his father's side, he inherited an appreciation from the arts, while from his mother's side, he learned to appreciate the value of a large, loving family.
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In 1939, at nine years old, Pinter was separated from this family, and made to evacuate to an old castle deep in the English countryside. Here, he lived with twenty-four other children roughly his age, and slept on wooden bunk beds in stables that had been converted to bedrooms. This time, during which he experienced loneliness, bewilderment, separation, and loss, seems to have left a profound imprint in his works. Additionally, Pinter noted that his experience living with other lonely, isolated young boys opened him up to the “horrid” nature of young men. He returned to this evacuation site frequently throughout his life, taking both his wives to visit the old castle.
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After high school, Pinter trained temporarily at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but did not enjoy his time there and so dropped out in 1949. Thereafter, Pinter wrote short stories and poems while acting in various theater repertories. It was during this time that he met fellow actor Vivian Merchant, who he married in 1956, despite his parents’ objections to him marrying a non-Jewish girl. (By this time, Pinter had become decidedly secular.)
In 1956, he began work on his first play, The Birthday Party. This work kicks off the string of play-writing works that he is best remembered for today. He also directed productions of his own plays, and was at one point an Associate Director at the National Theatre.
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In 1980, he remarried, to Lady Antonia Fraser, a historian. During this time, he began to write shorter, more overtly political plays. In 2005, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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He died of throat cancer in 2008.
DECOLONIZATION AND THE LARGER EUROPEAN DILEMMA
SOCIETY
The mid 1950s to 60s also saw major decolonization movements in many of Britain’s colonies. These movements catalyzed a fundamental interrogation of British culture—the public then had to confront the possibility that European culture was not, in fact, superior, and could even be “violent, unjust and…hypocritical”. (Sinfield, 135)
THEATRE
British theater grappled with this crisis through plays that questioned the violent undertones of British imperial power. In particular, it exposed the ways in which racialized violence was taught to the young men of Britain: Edward Bond’s 1965 play Saved featured young men killing a baby in its pram, crying “Looks like a yeller-nigger”.
Sources
Billington, Michael. The Life and Work of Harold Pinter. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Print.
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Gordon, Robert. Harold Pinter: The Theatre of Power. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Print.
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Hinchliffe, Arnold P. Harold Pinter. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981. Print.
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J. Ellen Gainor, Stanton B. Garner, Jr., H. Martin Puchner. The Norton Anthology of Drama. New York :W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. Print.
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Sinfield, Alan. Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Print.