Harold Pinter: Playwright, Actor, Activist

December 29, 2024 6:01 PM

What it says on the tin

(all blockquotes from the main link or Wikipedia unless noted)

THE PLAYWRIGHT

The Room (1957)

Considered by critics the earliest example of Pinter's "comedy of menace"... including features considered hallmarks of Pinter's early work and of the so-called "Pinteresque" dialogue that is comically familiar and yet disturbingly unfamiliar, simultaneously or alternatingly both mundane and frightening; subtle yet contradictory and ambiguous characterizations; a comic yet menacing mood characteristic of mid-twentieth-century English tragicomedy; a plot featuring reversals and surprises that can be both funny and emotionally moving; and an unconventional ending that leaves at least some questions unresolved.

a 1987 Robert Altman film, with Linda Hunt, Donald Pleasance, Annie Lennox, and Julian Sands

The Birthday Party (1957)

In the setting of a rundown seaside boarding house, a little birthday party is turned into a nightmare when two sinister strangers arrive unexpectedly. ... Pinter likens it to his later, explicitly political work. "It's the destruction of an individual, the independent voice of an individual."

William Friedkin's 1968 passion-project film, with Robert Shaw and Patrick Magee

... and my preference, a 1987 BBC production (parts 1, 2, 3, 4), with Joan Plowright, Julie Walters, and Pinter himself in the pivotal role of Goldberg.

The Dumb Waiter (1957)

Small but perfectly formed, The Dumb Waiter might be considered the best of Harold Pinter's early plays, more consistent than The Birthday Party and sharper than The Caretaker. It combines the classic characteristics of early Pinter – a paucity of information and an atmosphere of menace, working-class small-talk in a claustrophobic setting – with an oblique but palpable political edge and, in so doing, can be seen as containing the germ of Pinter's entire dramatic oeuvre.

a 1965 Esso Repertory Theatre production

A Slight Ache (1958)

The fascination of A Slight Ache, and indeed of most of Mr. Pinter’s other work, is its relation with its audience. This play ends with a collapse on stage and a worried audience watching it. But each member of the audience is worried in his own way; Mr. Pinter is not just writing for a conventional theatre response.

a 1967 BBC production

The Hothouse (1958)

A tragicomedy set in an institution whose nature is subject to interpretation; throughout the play, it is ambiguously referred to as both a "rest home" and a "sanitorium" but its "residents" or "patients" are designated anonymously by numbers, not by their names.

a 1989 reading by Pinter at the 92nd Street Y

The Caretaker (1959)

The confluence of power, allegiance, innocence, and corruption among two brothers and a tramp, became Pinter's first significant commercial success... remains one of Pinter's most celebrated and oft-performed plays.

the famous monologue, performed by Colin Firth

the 1963 film, with Robert Shaw, Donald Pleasance, and Alan Bates

A Night Out (1959)

As well as demonstrating its author's remarkable ear for the rhythms of everyday speech, A Night Out bears the thematic hallmarks that established Pinter as the most celebrated playwright of his generation - the difficulty of true communication, the thick layers of meaning buried in language and the mutually destructive patterns of behaviour that can come to dominate relationships.

the original ITV television production, with Pinter himself (using his stage name David Baron) and then-wife Vivien Merchant

The Collection (1961)

It is spare, funny, tense, packed with menace, and extraordinarily intelligent about the subtle ways the English exploit and manipulate each other. Other dramatists give you the one-tenth of the human personality that breaks the surface. Pinter keeps you creatively guessing about the nine-tenths hidden underneath.

a 1976 television production, with Malcolm McDowell, Alan Bates, Helen Mirren, and Laurence Olivier

The Lover (1962)

The Lover has been staged successfully both as an ironic comedy on the one hand and as a nervy drama on the other. As is often the case with Pinter, the play probably contains both. ... The Financial Times wrote "The little play works simply beautifully, like a perfectly adjusted piece of miniature machinery, except that machinery is dead and this play is scintillating alive."

the 1963 television production with Vivien Merchant

The Homecoming (1964)

Surveying Pinter's career on the occasion of the 40-anniversary Broadway production of the play at the Cort Theatre in The New Yorker, the critic John Lahr describes the impact of experiencing it: "The Homecoming changed my life. Before the play, I thought words were just vessels of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defence. Before, I thought theatre was about the spoken; after, I understood the eloquence of the unspoken. The position of a chair, the length of a pause, the choice of a gesture, I realised, could convey volumes."

Probably Pinter's masterpiece.

the 1973 film version for the American Film Theatre, with Merchant and Ian Holm in the role for which he won a Tony Award when the play moved to Broadway

their electrifying scene together

Landscape (1967)

The play shows the difficulties of communication between two people in a marriage. This is illustrated through the two characters who appear to be talking to one another though neither seems to hear the other.

a 1995 BBC production, with Ian Holm and Penelope Wilton

Old Times (1970)

Old Times was ranked among the 40 greatest plays ever written by Paul Taylor and Holly Williams of The Independent, and described as one of Pinter's "most haunting and unnerving pieces"... During rehearsals for a Roundabout Theatre Company production in 1984, Anthony Hopkins, who starred, asked Pinter to explain the play's ending. Pinter responded, "I don't know. Just do it."

a 2009 excerpt from a Pinter celebration, with Alan Rickman

No Man's Land (1974)

the sense of being caught in some mysterious limbo between life and death, between a world of brute reality and one of fluid uncertainty. ... the play is a masterly summation of all the themes that have long obsessed Pinter: the fallibility of memory, the co-existence in one man of brute strength and sensitivity, the ultimate unknowability of women, the notion that all human contact is a battle between who and whom. ... It is in no sense a dry, mannerist work but a living, theatrical experience full of rich comedy in which one speech constantly undercuts another

a 1978 television production, with Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud

Betrayal (1978)

Of the 1983 film version, with Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley, adapted by Pinter himself, Roger Ebert* wrote:

The absolutely brilliant thing about Betrayal is that it is a love story told backward. There is a lot in this movie that is wonderful — the performances, the screenplay by Harold Pinter — but what makes it all work is the structure. When Pinter’s stage version of Betrayal first appeared, back in the late 1970s, there was a tendency to dismiss his reverse chronology as a gimmick. Not so. It is the very heart and soul of this story. it means that we in the audience know more about the unhappy romantic fortunes of Jerry and Robert and Emma at every moment than they know about themselves. Even their joy is painful to see.

(Yes, it inspired the Seinfeld episode.)

Family Voices (1981)

This radio play exposes the story of a mother, son, and dead husband and father through a series of letters that the mother and son have written to one another and that each speaks aloud.

a 1981 BBC Radio presentation

A Kind of Alaska (1982)

A one-act play inspired by Oliver Sacks's Awakenings.

a 1984 television production, with Dorothy Tutin and Paul Scofield

Victoria Station (1982)

Many sensed dramatic possibilities in those disembodied bleatings, drifting from sleazy shop-fronts in Canning Town to Cortinas in Fulham or Chiswick; but only Pinter could bring to such an exchange the interest in mutual manipulation, the banality yet strangeness of language, place and event, the unpindownable sense of unease, that leaves you wondering if you arenít actually hearing two sceptres playing out their last rituals in an empty, airless and conceivably post-devaluation London.

a 2003 TV production, with Rufus Sewell

One for the Road (1984)

One for the Road, considered Harold Pinter's statement about the human rights abuses of totalitarian governments, was inspired by reading Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, a book about torture on Argentina's military dictatorship.

"It is the most terrible play, at times nearly unbearable to sit through. ... it floods the mind with despair, the eyes with tears, the stomach with sickness, the heart with dread."

The first of Pinter's explicitly political plays. Unpleasantly unforgettable.

The 1985 television production, with Alan Bates is definitive, though Pinter acquits himself favorably in his own performance.

[CW for this and all the other political plays: implied Very Awful Things]

Mountain Language (1988)

Pinter, while admitting to being inspired by his trip with Arthur Miller to Turkey at a time when they were persecuting the Kurds, observed that many repressive regimes have banned languages.

the television production, with original cast members Michael Gambon and Miranda Richardson

The New World Order (1991)

The New World Order lasts 10 nerve wracking minutes and gets closer to the nerve of torture than any play I know. Quite possibly Pinter can turn this kind of thing on and off at will; but I doubt that any imitator, however adept could do it.

a 2018 video production

Party Time (1991)

Party Time, getting its world premiere, is set in smart, fashionable London. Gavin, a suave power-broker, is throwing a party at which his guests prat-tle of exclusive health-clubs, idyllic island retreats, past romantic liaisons. Meanwhile in the streets outside there is a violent disorder which is being savagely suppressed. Finally the external world intrudes in the shape of a burning white light and the vehement pres-ence of Jimmy, brother of one of the guests, testifying to the merciless extinction of dissent.

(The only videos I could find were amateur performances in Italian. Sorry.)

Moonlight (1993)

It is dominated still by the fear of dying and of estrangement from one's kin. But more than before, it seems to be about the mutual hunger for contact between those separated either by the grave or by the unhealed wounds of family life.

a 2005 radio broadcast, with Pinter in the lead role

Celebration (1999)

Pinter has occasionally and rightly complained that critics seldom credit him with any sense of comedy, and as if to disprove that misap-prehension Celebration is certainly his funniest and also perhaps his most accessible script in many years.

a 2006 television adaptation, with Michael Gambon, Penelope Wilton, Colin Firth, Sophie Okonedo, and Stephen Rea

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THE ACTOR

Even outside of his own works, Pinter was a capable actor.

No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, in a 1964 BBC adaptation (previously)

Krapp's Last Tape, by another cricket-loving Nobel laureate playwright: Samuel Beckett

the 1998 film adaptation of Mansfield Park

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THE ACTIVIST

He walked the walk.

And his Nobel lecture, "Art, Truth & Politics", delivered with one foot in the grave, is a blistering attack on American imperialism that is more relevant than ever 20 years later.

(previously on MetaFilter)

a post on the political plays

the Nobel Prize post

the obituary post

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If you don't know where to start, this clip from the BBC Birthday Party (sorry about the aspect ratio) is a prime showcase for the writing, the acting, and the politics all together.

posted by Lemkin (4 comments total)

I miss Matteo.
posted by clavdivs at 6:48 PM on December 29 [3 favorites]

Lemkin, this post of yours, it’s something else. Just, wow.
posted by ashbury at 9:12 PM on December 29 [3 favorites]

Thanks so much for this incredibly comprehensive post. I remember seeing a Harold Pinter play as a teenager and talking to one of the actors afterward. The part I remember most was the idea that in the play, whoever is speaking the least in a given scene is the one with most power. That idea stuck with me and I’ve thought of it in many other situations.
posted by umbú at 9:53 PM on December 29 [3 favorites]

This is such a comprehensive memorial. It seems fitting for someone who wrote so many memorable works.

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posted by kitten kaboodle at 11:07 AM on December 30 [1 favorite]