Harold Pinter, 1930 - 2008.

The Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, one of the greatest playwrights of his generation, has died. Pinter, who was suffering from cancer, died yesterday aged 78.

Haroon Siddique, Guardian.

The death of Harold Pinter comes as a great shock. We all knew, of course, that he had endured a succession of illnesses ever since 2000. But there was a physical toughness and tenacity of will about Harold that made us all believe he would survive for a few more years yet. Sadly, it was not to be....

Updated through 12/31.

Pinter's contribution to drama was immense. He had a poet's ear for language, an almost flawless sense of dramatic rhythm and the ability to distil the conflicts of daily life. I believe his plays, from The Room in 1957 to Celebration in 2000, will endure wind and weather. Indeed many of them already, such as The Birthday Party, The Homeconming and No Man's Land, have the status of modern classics. Pinter was also, of course, a highly political animal, as evidenced by his later plays, his crusading articles and speeches and his famous Nobel Lecture which brilliantly skewered the lies surrounding US foreign policy.

Michael Billington, Guardian.

See also: HaroldPinter.org and the Wikipedia entry.

Updates: "In more than 30 plays... Mr Pinter captured the anxiety and ambiguity of life in the second half of the 20th century with terse, hypnotic dialogue filled with gaping pauses and the prospect of imminent violence," write Mel Gussow and Ben Brantley in the New York Times. "Along with another Nobel winner, Samuel Beckett, his friend and mentor, Mr. Pinter became one of the few modern playwrights whose names instantly evoke a sensibility. The adjective Pinteresque has become part of the cultural vocabulary as a byword for strong and unspecified menace."

"Among contemporary dramatists Harold Pinter holds a unique place," writes the London Times. "Few, if any, have so lastingly and so profoundly influenced fellow playwrights — not just in this country but beyond.... David Hare wrote that Pinter never offered audiences 'the easy handhold with which they might be able to take some simplified view of the events on stage,' and that 'it is this willingness to say "take it or leave it" which finally makes his work so inimitable.'"

"The plays were usually set within the confines of a room," notes the Telegraph, "seedy in his earlier work but increasingly elegant later. His dramas brought into confrontation a variety of persons, from vagrants and prostitutes to middle-class married couples and self-proclaimed poets, in circumstances bordering on violence or menace and in language that was precise, elegant and often very funny.... But what gave distinction to all Pinter's writing for the stage and screen was its fascinating opacity. The curtain would rise on a realistic, domestic situation but within minutes the truth about it - and whatever might be gleaned of the people in it - would be called unconsciously into question by their statements."

"Pinter's best-known, early plays have been filmed, but, perhaps because they depend so much on the heat and dazzle of live performance, getting the transition from stage to screen to take has often proven problematic," writes Phil Nugent in Screengrab. "But Pinter's strongest impact in movies came through screenplay adaptations of others' work - and he did a surprisingly large number of them, especially as his standard of living improved. Among the ones that stand out are his adaptation of Penelope Mortimer's novel The Pumpkin Eater for Jack Clayton's 1964 film, and the first of his many collaborations with the director Joseph Losey, The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967), both starring Dirk Bogarde. He also wrote Losey's 1970 The Go-Between and prepared a script for a film based on Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past for which Losey was never able to obtain funding; it was published in book form as The Proust Screenplay, and eventually adapted to the stage."

"He earned two Oscar nominations for adapted screenplay," notes Edward Copeland. "One for adapting the novel The French Lieutenant's Woman and one for adapting his own brilliant play Betrayal. The story about a romance told in reverse chronological order starred Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley and remains one of my favorite films. It even inspired the great backward Seinfeld episode called 'The Betrayal' where a character was named Pinter in further homage."

Ed Champion pays tribute Pinteresquely.

Updates, 12/26: "Pinter radically altered and energized the traditional dynamic of the stage," writes Richard Corliss for Time. "It was no longer simply the place where people spoke; it was where not speaking could be far more suggestive, dangerous, theatrical, eloquent. Like Beckett, he renounced the flossy rhetoric of such postwar playwrights as Christopher Fry and Jean Anouilh for a back-to-basics starkness - a two-men-on-a-stage simplicity that Aeschylus would have admired."

"Although he expressed the views of a pacifist, Pinter wrote as if he held his finger on the pin of a grenade," writes Peter Marks in the Washington Post. "Violence of some nature was never out of the realm of possibility, even in his quietest plays. For Pinter was a connoisseur of subtext, of letting a story unfold on a living room set while a more savage one simmered in the crawl spaces of the mind. His characters routinely rattle each other with what never gains utterance."

James Wolcott quotes a fine passage from Simon Gray's The Last Cigarette.

"The death of this most anti-Establishment member of the Establishment was announced just as the whole country, so it seemed, was settling down to the most conventional of our festive meals," notes the Independent. "What is more, Pinter's broadcast obituaries preceded the day's great set-piece, the Queen's Christmas message, by a mere couple of hours. As someone in the business of staging and upstaging, he could hardly have done better for theatricality."

Also, former literary editor Robert Winder: "Among his more famous accomplishments - the vivid and original theatre, the world-spanning production schedule, the screenplays, the political fury, the Nobel Prize - there is a fraternity of cricket-lovers who will raise a glass and remember him for other things: the tenacious innings, the warm letter of congratulation, the implacable raised finger."

Granta gathers linkage.

Online viewing tip. Dan Callahan and Kevin Lee on The Go-Between.

Update, 12/27: "His writing for cinema covered a remarkably wide spectrum," writes Geoffrey MacNab after picking out a few notable performances, too, for the Independent. "He scripted thrillers, costume dramas and one very overwrought sci-fi yarn (the ill-starred adaptation of Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale.) He even directed a film, a 1974 adaptation of Simon Gray's play Butley starring Alan Bates as an academic whose life is coming apart at the seams."

Updates, 12/28: "A great dramatist? Maybe. But also slippery one," argues Nick Cohen, who also argued with Pinter face-to-face over the years. In the Observer, he recalls their opposing positions on Saddam vs the Kurds and Milosevic vs just about everyone but the Russians. "I know you should never judge artists by their politics. Pinter's double standards and defences of tyrants may not stop history seeing him as a great playwright any more than Auden's support for communism and Yeats's flirtation with fascism in the 30s stopped them being great poets.... Pinter's darkness was a part of his greatness. He could dramatize men's will to dominate and their betrayals so well because he knew them both too intimately."

Also, Susannah Clapp: "What makes Harold Pinter important - exhilarating as well as frightening, generous as well as premonitory - is that he showed the peculiarity and richness of everyday language. He made us listen to ourselves more closely."

And Richard Eyre: "[B]y the age of 18 I had seen only two professional productions: Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic and Much Ado About Nothing at Stratford. Then I saw The Caretaker and I felt something like Berlioz encountering Shakespeare - 'coming on me unawares, [he] struck me like a thunderbolt,' to which he added 'and at this time of my life I neither spoke nor understood a word of English.'"

Update, 12/29: "Pinter will be remembered for doing what postmodernism claims you can't do any more: create a complete and consistent imagined world." David Edgar in the Guardian.

Updates, 12/31: "Family and close friends of playwright Harold Pinter have gathered to say farewell at a private funeral," reports the BBC.

"The theatre is a large, energetic, public activity. Writing is, for me, a completely private activity; a poem or a play, no difference. These facts are not easy to reconcile." The Guardian runs an extract from a speech Pinter gave at the National Student Drama festival in Bristol in 1962.

Also, half an hour of online listening. "A few months before his death, Harold Pinter was interviewed by actor Harry Burton at the British Library to commemorate the donation of his archive. In this edited version of their conversation, Pinter reminisces about his years in rep theatre, talks about his relationship with his father, discusses his poetry - and explains why not everything Alan Ayckbourn says about him is true."

FilmCatcher's Damon Smith revisits "Peter Hall's nervy, studiously faithful adaptation of The Homecoming (1973), which Pinter scripted. One of the finest American Film Theatre productions of the 1970s, it's also one of my all-time favorite stage-to-screen adaptations, as it seems both organically rooted in the squalid decay of Edward Heath's Britain and, through Hall's exquisite editing and shot composition, eminently cinematic too."

Posted by dwhudson at December 25, 2008 6:18 AM