Harold Pinter showed the power struggle hidden in everyday talk

Person: Harold Pinter
Lived: 1930–2008
Field: Playwriting, screenwriting
From: British

The story

Harold Pinter, the son of a Jewish tailor in Hackney, East London, spent most of the 1950s as a touring actor before he began to write plays. His first, The Room, was written in three days in 1957 for a student production in Bristol. His second, The Birthday Party, opened in London in 1958 and was savaged by critics, but within a few years it had become one of his most performed works. The Caretaker (1960) and The Homecoming (1965) made his name around the world.

What made these plays new was the way people talk in them. Earlier stage dialogue in English tended to be tidy and explanatory: characters said what they felt and explained what was happening. Pinter wrote dialogue that sounded like real speech, with repetitions, dodges, non sequiturs and long silences. The critic Irving Wardle borrowed the phrase “comedy of menace” for the result. A play begins in an apparently innocent situation, two people in a room, a cup of tea, small talk, and slowly becomes threatening, while the audience laughs and then stops laughing.

The Swedish Academy described his achievement plainly. Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements, an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles. With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of conversation; the audience is allowed to eavesdrop on domination and submission hidden in the most mundane exchanges. In his Nobel lecture he explained that his plays often began with nothing more than a line, such as “What have you done with the scissors?”, which opens The Homecoming.

This way of seeing spread far beyond his own work. His name became an adjective, “Pinteresque”, for any situation charged with unspoken threat, and his techniques influenced later playwrights and screenwriters. He wrote 29 plays and 27 screenplays, including The Servant, The Go-Between and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, carrying the same attention to what is left unsaid into cinema. In the 1980s he showed that the same method could expose torture and political oppression, in plays such as One for the Road and Mountain Language.

His plays remain in constant production worldwide and are studied in schools and drama courses. London’s Comedy Theatre was renamed the Harold Pinter Theatre in 2011.

Why it matters

Pinter’s plays taught audiences and writers everywhere to hear the fear and power hidden in ordinary words, and they are still performed and studied around the world.

About Harold Pinter

Hackney-born playwright whose “comedies of menace” showed how ordinary talk hides power and fear, and who campaigned with PEN for writers jailed for their words. Nobel Prize 2005.

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Harold Pinter

1930–2008 · Playwriting, screenwriting

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