HAROLD PINTER

master of 'the comedy of menace'

A few elements characterize Pinter’s work:

1. a hackneyed, humdrum situation;
2. a deliberate gap in the details;
3. thrills and mystery.

Rational explanations for actions and motives are not provided. Pinter uses language to spout (in high-quality beatnik fashion) suspense, rage, and fear. Each syllable and aspiration contributes to the tension of the atmosphere and probes the existential questions.

He became associated with the “Theatre of the Absurd,” a term that was coined by critic, Martin Esslin to describe certain plays of the 1950s and 1960s that staged the ideas of French philosopher, Albert Camus. In his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus argues that the human condition is insignificant: humans do not have the capacity to understand or to rationalize the universe. In this sense, the world is seen to be ‘absurd.”

The five defining playwrights of the movement, according to Martin Esslin...!
Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, and Harold Pinter

Sometimes these writers preferred to use terms like
"Anti-Theater" or "New Theater."

The playwrights of this group are characterized by their plays’ elements of bewilderment and mystery and the enigmatic universe.

Other playwrights associated with the Theatre of the Absurd
Tom Stoppard, Arthur Kopit, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Fernando Arrabal, Edward Albee, N.F. Simpson, Boris Vian, Peter Weiss, Vaclav Havel, and Jean Tardieu

Perhaps the most famous, and most controversial, absurdist play
- - - Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot

• Strange caricature characters

• Ludicrous language

• … the play seems to end in precisely the same condition it began, with no real change having occurred. Sometimes it’s referred to as “the play where nothing happens.”

Absurd drama is propelled by the basic existential questions. The language is ludicrous and unreliable; it appears as a conventionalized method for meaningless communication through the absurd use of clichés and slogans. It warps logic and exchanges rationality for nonsense. "And you may ask yourself-Well...How did I get here?"

(Talking Heads)

American playwright Edward Albee writes,
“For just as it is true that our response to color and form was forever altered once the impressionist painters put their minds to canvas, it is just as true that the playwrights of The Theatre of the Absurd have forever altered our response to the theatre.”

Seinfeld, the Absurdist? ... x3 makes a nice effect ha ha



HAROLD PINTER
...

"... I find critics on the whole a pretty unnecessary bunch of people. We don't need critics to tell the audiences what to think."


Born 10 October 1930
Hackney, London

At the outbreak of WWII, Pinter was evacuated from London and sent to live in a castle on the coast with 26 other boys. He returned to London at 14, but the wartime bombing had made a deep impression. Pinter attended Hackney Downs Grammar School while he wrote poetry for minor magazines as a kid. He read Kafka and Hemingway and acted in school productions. In 1948 he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and in 1950 he published poems in Poetry (London) under the name ‘Harold Pinta.’ Pinter was accepted at the Central School of Speech and Drama in 1951 but soon left to join Anew McMaster’s Irish repertory company. Until 1957, Pinter pursued an acting career using the stage name of David Baron.

In 1957, Pinter debuted his skills as a playwright in Bristol, where he presented The Room. The same year he wrote The Birthday Party, a Kafkaesque tale of a seemingly ordinary man who is chased by two odd strangers. In 1957 the play closed after one week however, today it is on of Pinter’s most frequently performed plays. The Birthday Party

Pinter wrote The Caretaker in 1960. With this play, Pinter emerged as a major modern playwright. The Homecoming (1965) won a Tony Award, the Whitbread Anglo-American Theater Award, and the New York Drama Critics’ Award. The play’s themes of domination are iterated in later works such as Landscape (1969) and Old Times (1971). In 1977, Pinter wrote a screenplay that is based on Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Pinter was a human rights activist whose opinions were mainly controversial. He openly condemned Nato’s intervention during the Kosov crisis in 1999 and in 2001 he joined the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic (ICDSM). At an anti-war meeting in 2002, Pinter spoke against Bush’s role in the war against Iraq. In 2005, Pinter announced his decision to leave his career as a playwright and dedicate himself to politics. Harold Pinter died on December 24, 2008 in London.


H. Pinter has received many awards!
including...

• the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear, 1963
• BAFTA awards, in 1965 + 1971
• the Hamburg Shakespeare Prize, 1970
• the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or, 1971
• the Commonwealth Award, 1981
• and, the Laurence Olivier Award for a lifetime's achievement in the theatre, 1996
• also, he was made a Companion of Honour for services to literature, 2002

lists and lists (of Pinter's work): http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-bio-bibl.html

SOURCES

1. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-bio-bibl.html
2. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hpinter.htm
3. http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc28.html
4. http://www.theatredatabase.com/20th_century/theatre_of_the_absurd.html