Harold Pinter Overview

Although acting was the first career of Harold Pinter, his stage work was abruptly eclipsed by his prodigious writing talent. Thematically influenced by Kafka and Beckett, the plays of this contemporary master of the comic absurd offer uneasy glimpses into existential... [more]

Although acting was the first career of Harold Pinter, his stage work was abruptly eclipsed by his prodigious writing talent. Thematically influenced by Kafka and Beckett, the plays of this contemporary master of the comic absurd offer uneasy glimpses into existential struggles for survival and identity in these irrational, inexplicable times. Pinter made inroads to the conventional theatrical junket with disquieting early plays such as "The Dumb Waiter" (1957), "The Birthday Party" (1958), and "The Caretaker" (1960). From their characteristically pleasant beginnings, Pinter's plays slowly shift tonalities. They cloak themselves in the omnipresent colors of anxiety, fear, and pathos, as the characters seek to avoid or to defend against some unknown or self-created danger that is rooted their existential terror of vulnerability. Isolating his characters in confined spaces, Pinter allows them to wrestle with their neuroses in an open-ended yet realistically drawn universe. As a playwright, he insists that he can't know everything about his characters, since he's unaware of everything that goes on in his own mind. Because of this problem, which he claims that traditional drama has not addressed, he can only record a situation as it reveals itself. Pinter's legendary absorption in the cadence and effect of everyday speech extends to its subtext: the silences and omissions that are as important as the spoken words. Though astonishingly prolific in several mediums -- screenwriting, poetry, and directing to name a few -- Pinter has by no means forsaken the theater. Later plays such as "Betrayal" (1978), "Moonlight" (1994), and "Ashes to Ashes" (1997) have prompted hardened reviewers to assert, "there is no playwright his equal. He is the natural descendent of Joyce, by way of Samuel Beckett." Pinter's sparse poetry reveals a world left bare by what is unspoken. This still-unsettling mixture of mystery, tension, and mounting horror cements Pinter's reputation as one of the finest living dramatists. [show less]