Pinter, Harold. (b. 1930).
W o r k
< influenced by the ‘theatre of the absurd’, especially by Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco
- aims at a dramatic representation of a world of seeming inconsequentiality: builds up a pattern of inconsequential conversation, dislocated relationships, and undefined threats
- typically uses the setting of a single room (refuge, prison cell, trap, etc.) to symbolize the restricted world of its occupants
- his characters' ritualised relationship with its rules and taboos are disturbed by a stranger on to whom they project their deepest desires, guilts, and neuroses
- exploits the dramatic effect of pacing, pausing, and timing: a master of pauses and silences to communicate a secondary level of meaning often opposed to the first
- uses striking and disturbing language with an excellent ear for the rhythms of the colloquial, repetitive London English
- typically mirrors the concluding breakdown of the play in the breakdown of language
> awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (2005)
The Room (1957)
The Dumb Waiter (1957)
The Birthday Party (1957):
- two articulate characters break an inarticulate man with their monstrous staccato barrage of unanswerable questions and half-associated ideas
The Caretaker (1959)
The Homecoming (1964):
- shifts away from his earlier comedies
- opens typically with a one-sided conversation in an undistinguished room in a London house
- everything in the play remains unspecific: inexplicit frictions between generations, conflicts between the uneducated family members x the homecoming educated son, etc.
Old Times (1971), No Man’s Land (1975), and Betrayal (1978):
- further develop the uncertainty and hints of menace and ominousness
- play with the disjunctions of memory and with unstable human relationships, both between friends and lovers
One for the Road (1984) and Mountain Language (1988):
- replaces the representations of uncertainty by a more political drama
- shifts from indeterminacy towards moral definition
- abandons threats by an unspecific menace in favour of threats of oppression by unnamed modern states
- concerned with language as the means of power defined and manipulated to suit the ends of those actually holding power
Basics
(Photo: Broken English com).
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Author
Harold Pinter. (b. 1930). British. -
Work
Playwright. Scriptwriter. Nobel Prize Winner (2005). Author of The Dumb Waiter (1957). -
Genres
Absurd drama. Comedy. Farce. Political drama.
Literature
Abrams, Meyer Howard, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Barnard, Robert. Stručné dějiny anglické literatury. Praha: Brána, 1997.
Baugh, Albert C. ed. A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
Coote, Stephen. The Penguin Short History of English Literature. London: Penguin, 1993.
Sampson, George. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.
Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Quote
"You need a long convalescence. / A change of air. / Somewhere over the rainbow. / Where angels fear to tread. / Exactly. / You're in a rut. / You look anaemic. / Rheumatic. / Myopic. / Epileptic. / You're on the verge. / You're a dead duck. / But we can save you. / From a worse state."
From The Birthday Party (1957).