Widely regarded as "the most gifted playwright in England" and "Britain's most significant playwright since Bernard Shaw," Harold Pinter was born in 1930 in Hackney, a working-class district of London. He spent much of his childhood under the shadow of World War II and the London Blitz--a difficult experience for any boy, but perhaps especially threatening for a Jewish child well-aware of the anti-semitism of the Third Reich.
As a boy of nine, Pinter was evacuated from the capital to a castle in Cornwall, a remote part of England, where he and a group of other young refugees took shelter from the threat of Nazi bombs. During this time, Pinter says, he became a "morose little boy," noting that, "I missed my parents. We missed each other very much." He also recalls another boy from the group whose "parents and baby sister were killed in one fell swoop by a bomb in London, and I remember very well I was with him when we got the news. It was very difficult to appreciate what death was. At nine, to hear that your parents and sister are dead; he couldn't take it in."
Pinter returned to his London home after about a year. The bomb threat persisted, however, with German air-raids inflicting damage on Pinter's own neighborhood. "There were times when I would open our back door and find our garden in flames," he has recalled. "Our house never burned, but we had to evacuate several times."
These experiences left a deep mark on Pinter, leading him at the age of eighteen to refuse military service. "I was aware of the suffering and the horror of war, and by no means was I going to subscribe to keep it going. I said no." His application for conscientious objector status, however, was twice rejected, and he received his draft notice from the army—a summons he refused to obey. This act of defiance might have resulted in his imprisonment; instead, a lenient magistrate fined the young man thirty pounds, a sum paid by his parents.
Both the wartime encounter with German bombs and the post-war conflict with the military and judicial systems seem to have made an ongoing impact on Pinter's work. His plays are often marked by the threat of irrational violence and haunted by the sense of individual entanglement in a complex and often incomprehensible web of social forces. From his earliest works to the present, Pinter's characters are confronted with the pressure to betray themselves or their intimate associates. This compulsion to betray may come from external, authoritarian voices, like the draft boards and magistrates of Pinter's youth; or it may come from within, from some weakness that leads the individual into dishonesty towards himself or others.
Pinter's involvement with the theater began in the middle and late 1940s during his student years at Hackney Downs Grammar School where he acted in productions of Shakespeare, playing such roles as Macbeth and Romeo. It was at the same school that he began to write, turning first to poetry and essays as forms of expression. After graduation, he entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts to study acting, but dropped out after two terms, and spent the next year or so as an unemployed poet. In 1950 he began acting for the BBC, and by 1951 he had returned to drama school. Late in 1951 he joined a theatrical troupe which toured Ireland playing the classics, and between 1953 and 1958 he acted professionally, both in London and in provincial theaters.
In 1957 his first play, The Room, a one-act drama, was performed by students at Bristol University, and was enthusiastically reviewed by the distinguished critic, Harold Hobson. As a result of this review a London producer invited Pinter to submit any other plays he might have on hand. There were two: The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter, both dealing with the theme of betrayal. In the former, Pinter's first full-length play, a solitary young man named Stanley is accused by Goldberg and McCann of treason against some nameless organization, and is relentlessly bullied by them into returning to the group, thus being coerced into betraying himself. The Dumb Waiter is about two small-time hoodlums assigned to murder an anonymous victim. The play ends when one of the killers discovers that the victim is his partner—another gruesome moment of betrayal.
The Birthday Party was the first of Pinter's works to receive a professional production, and the first to fail disastrously. Many critics found the play insane and incomprehensible, and dismissed it out of hand as the work of an incompetent author. It is now regarded as a classic of the modern theater.
It was not until 1959 that Pinter experienced critical and financial success as a dramatist with The Caretaker. Here again, the issue of betrayal is paramount, as one character attempts to turn brother against brother. In his next international success, The Homecoming (1965), for which Pinter won New York's Tony Award, a wife decides to abandon her husband to live with her in-laws as a kind of prostitute-queen, a further bizarre development of the idea of infidelity.
These works, together with a number of shorter plays written before 1970, share certain features that characterize the first phase of Pinter's writing career. In addition to exploring the theme of betrayal, these plays present plots and characters that are frequently cryptic, with situations and actions that go largely unexplained. Unlike more conventional realistic dramas, where characters' psychological motivations are explored in detail, Pinter's plays leave audiences guessing about the reasons for the behavior of people on stage.
In The Birthday Party, for example, we never learn precisely why Goldberg and McCann want to take Stanley away with them, what their prior relations with Stanley have been, or why Stanley fears them so much. Instead, as is often the case with people we encounter in real life, these characters on stage remain strangers to us, and we find we must accept them as fundamentally mysterious and unknowable.
Around 1969, Pinter's work began taking a somewhat different turn. The settings of his plays changed from what had previously been mostly lower or lower-middle class environments to the upper-middle class world of London professionals and intellectuals. The insistent air of sinister, absurdist mystery surrounding characters and situations in his earlier work gives way to a more conventional version of the same experience. As the critic Mel Gussow notes, these plays "deal in varying degrees with memory, loss of memory, love, the absence of love." There is something enigmatic even about our most intimate relatives and friends, Pinter suggests, and what divides us most tellingly are our divergent memories of a past we thought we shared. In these works, the betrayals occur as a result of some inherent weakness or susceptibility in human character: the fallibility of memory or the inevitability of change over time. With such change comes the alteration or abandonment of old relationships, and the breaking of old allegiances. Such themes are prominent Pinter's work during the 1970s: Landscape, Silence, Old Times, and No Man's Land.
While continuing to develop as a playwright, Pinter also began writing for the screen early in his career. As he told one interviewer, "I enjoy cinema very much. I always have. Two things happened to me at a very early age. Naturally I fell in love, and I also found the cinema. They were actually two loves: cinema and girls."
In 1963, he wrote the script for The Servant, and has gone on to produce the screenplays for some seventeen movies, mostly adaptations of his own work and that of other writers. He has written screen adaptations of three of his own plays: The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, and Betrayal. His other movies include The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), Turtle Diary (1985), The Handmaid’s Tale (1990), and The Remains of the Day (1991).
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Pinter's work for the stage took an explicitly political turn. He became active in opposing the conservative policies of the Thatcher government in Britain, and in denouncing the violence of authoritarian regimes supported by England and the United States. These concerns were expressed in a number of short plays of often shocking brutality: One for the Road (1984), in which one character has his tongue cut out; Mountain Language (1988), in which prisoners are severely beaten; Party Time (1991), where, as one critic says, "the victim of the authorities is left with only the dark to suck on;" and The New World Order (1991), which depicts "the gratuitous torture" of an innocent prisoner. In these plays we seem to see the horrific realization of the menace and violence merely suggested in the earlier works. Now there is little mystery or doubt surrounding the tormentors; instead, the faintly comic—and inscrutable—Goldberg and McCann of The Birthday Party have been transformed into the murdering agents of oppressive governments.
In his most recent play, Moonlight (1993), which is currently running in New York, Pinter returns to the themes of the 1970s, exploring the conflicting memories and emotions of the members of a family whose father, Andy, is dying. Pinter says of this work that, "It's like opening a door, and you suddenly realize you're on a plain of gold. . . . I think there's no question what excited me was the image of one family dislocated but very much part of each other."
That sense of dislocation, of people being intimate strangers, together and apart at the same time, is central to Betrayal (1978).
As a boy of nine, Pinter was evacuated from the capital to a castle in Cornwall, a remote part of England, where he and a group of other young refugees took shelter from the threat of Nazi bombs. During this time, Pinter says, he became a "morose little boy," noting that, "I missed my parents. We missed each other very much." He also recalls another boy from the group whose "parents and baby sister were killed in one fell swoop by a bomb in London, and I remember very well I was with him when we got the news. It was very difficult to appreciate what death was. At nine, to hear that your parents and sister are dead; he couldn't take it in."
Pinter returned to his London home after about a year. The bomb threat persisted, however, with German air-raids inflicting damage on Pinter's own neighborhood. "There were times when I would open our back door and find our garden in flames," he has recalled. "Our house never burned, but we had to evacuate several times."
These experiences left a deep mark on Pinter, leading him at the age of eighteen to refuse military service. "I was aware of the suffering and the horror of war, and by no means was I going to subscribe to keep it going. I said no." His application for conscientious objector status, however, was twice rejected, and he received his draft notice from the army—a summons he refused to obey. This act of defiance might have resulted in his imprisonment; instead, a lenient magistrate fined the young man thirty pounds, a sum paid by his parents.
Both the wartime encounter with German bombs and the post-war conflict with the military and judicial systems seem to have made an ongoing impact on Pinter's work. His plays are often marked by the threat of irrational violence and haunted by the sense of individual entanglement in a complex and often incomprehensible web of social forces. From his earliest works to the present, Pinter's characters are confronted with the pressure to betray themselves or their intimate associates. This compulsion to betray may come from external, authoritarian voices, like the draft boards and magistrates of Pinter's youth; or it may come from within, from some weakness that leads the individual into dishonesty towards himself or others.
Pinter's involvement with the theater began in the middle and late 1940s during his student years at Hackney Downs Grammar School where he acted in productions of Shakespeare, playing such roles as Macbeth and Romeo. It was at the same school that he began to write, turning first to poetry and essays as forms of expression. After graduation, he entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts to study acting, but dropped out after two terms, and spent the next year or so as an unemployed poet. In 1950 he began acting for the BBC, and by 1951 he had returned to drama school. Late in 1951 he joined a theatrical troupe which toured Ireland playing the classics, and between 1953 and 1958 he acted professionally, both in London and in provincial theaters.
In 1957 his first play, The Room, a one-act drama, was performed by students at Bristol University, and was enthusiastically reviewed by the distinguished critic, Harold Hobson. As a result of this review a London producer invited Pinter to submit any other plays he might have on hand. There were two: The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter, both dealing with the theme of betrayal. In the former, Pinter's first full-length play, a solitary young man named Stanley is accused by Goldberg and McCann of treason against some nameless organization, and is relentlessly bullied by them into returning to the group, thus being coerced into betraying himself. The Dumb Waiter is about two small-time hoodlums assigned to murder an anonymous victim. The play ends when one of the killers discovers that the victim is his partner—another gruesome moment of betrayal.
The Birthday Party was the first of Pinter's works to receive a professional production, and the first to fail disastrously. Many critics found the play insane and incomprehensible, and dismissed it out of hand as the work of an incompetent author. It is now regarded as a classic of the modern theater.
It was not until 1959 that Pinter experienced critical and financial success as a dramatist with The Caretaker. Here again, the issue of betrayal is paramount, as one character attempts to turn brother against brother. In his next international success, The Homecoming (1965), for which Pinter won New York's Tony Award, a wife decides to abandon her husband to live with her in-laws as a kind of prostitute-queen, a further bizarre development of the idea of infidelity.
These works, together with a number of shorter plays written before 1970, share certain features that characterize the first phase of Pinter's writing career. In addition to exploring the theme of betrayal, these plays present plots and characters that are frequently cryptic, with situations and actions that go largely unexplained. Unlike more conventional realistic dramas, where characters' psychological motivations are explored in detail, Pinter's plays leave audiences guessing about the reasons for the behavior of people on stage.
In The Birthday Party, for example, we never learn precisely why Goldberg and McCann want to take Stanley away with them, what their prior relations with Stanley have been, or why Stanley fears them so much. Instead, as is often the case with people we encounter in real life, these characters on stage remain strangers to us, and we find we must accept them as fundamentally mysterious and unknowable.
Around 1969, Pinter's work began taking a somewhat different turn. The settings of his plays changed from what had previously been mostly lower or lower-middle class environments to the upper-middle class world of London professionals and intellectuals. The insistent air of sinister, absurdist mystery surrounding characters and situations in his earlier work gives way to a more conventional version of the same experience. As the critic Mel Gussow notes, these plays "deal in varying degrees with memory, loss of memory, love, the absence of love." There is something enigmatic even about our most intimate relatives and friends, Pinter suggests, and what divides us most tellingly are our divergent memories of a past we thought we shared. In these works, the betrayals occur as a result of some inherent weakness or susceptibility in human character: the fallibility of memory or the inevitability of change over time. With such change comes the alteration or abandonment of old relationships, and the breaking of old allegiances. Such themes are prominent Pinter's work during the 1970s: Landscape, Silence, Old Times, and No Man's Land.
While continuing to develop as a playwright, Pinter also began writing for the screen early in his career. As he told one interviewer, "I enjoy cinema very much. I always have. Two things happened to me at a very early age. Naturally I fell in love, and I also found the cinema. They were actually two loves: cinema and girls."
In 1963, he wrote the script for The Servant, and has gone on to produce the screenplays for some seventeen movies, mostly adaptations of his own work and that of other writers. He has written screen adaptations of three of his own plays: The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, and Betrayal. His other movies include The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), Turtle Diary (1985), The Handmaid’s Tale (1990), and The Remains of the Day (1991).
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Pinter's work for the stage took an explicitly political turn. He became active in opposing the conservative policies of the Thatcher government in Britain, and in denouncing the violence of authoritarian regimes supported by England and the United States. These concerns were expressed in a number of short plays of often shocking brutality: One for the Road (1984), in which one character has his tongue cut out; Mountain Language (1988), in which prisoners are severely beaten; Party Time (1991), where, as one critic says, "the victim of the authorities is left with only the dark to suck on;" and The New World Order (1991), which depicts "the gratuitous torture" of an innocent prisoner. In these plays we seem to see the horrific realization of the menace and violence merely suggested in the earlier works. Now there is little mystery or doubt surrounding the tormentors; instead, the faintly comic—and inscrutable—Goldberg and McCann of The Birthday Party have been transformed into the murdering agents of oppressive governments.
In his most recent play, Moonlight (1993), which is currently running in New York, Pinter returns to the themes of the 1970s, exploring the conflicting memories and emotions of the members of a family whose father, Andy, is dying. Pinter says of this work that, "It's like opening a door, and you suddenly realize you're on a plain of gold. . . . I think there's no question what excited me was the image of one family dislocated but very much part of each other."
That sense of dislocation, of people being intimate strangers, together and apart at the same time, is central to Betrayal (1978).