Pinter, Harold

Pinter, Harold (1930– ), poet and playwright, born in east London, the son of a Jewish tailor. His first play, The Room (1957), was followed by The Birthday Party (1958), in which Stanley, an out-of-work pianist in a seaside boarding house, is mysteriously threatened and taken over by two intruders, an Irishman and a Jew, who present him with a Kafkaesque indictment of unexplained crimes. Pinter's distinctive voice was soon recognized, and many successful plays followed, including The Caretaker (1960), The Lover (1963), The Homecoming (1965), Old Times (1971), and No Man's Land (1975). Betrayal (1978: film, 1982) is an ironic tragedy which ends in beginning and traces with a reversed chronology the development of a love affair between a man and his best friend's wife. Later plays include A Kind of Alaska (1982), One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), Party Time (1991), Ashes to Ashes (1996, a short drama of the Holocaust), and Moonlight (1993). Pinter's gift for portraying, by means of dialogue which realistically produces the nuances of colloquial speech, the difficulties of communication and the many layers of meaning in language, pause, and silence, has created a style labelled by the popular imagination as ‘Pinteresque’. He has also written for radio and television, directed plays, and written screenplays, which include versions of Hartley's The Go-Between (1969), and Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1982). His screenplays were published in two volumes in 2000.