Harold Pinter, a giant among playwrights of his or any generation, died in London on Dec. 24 after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 78.
Read my story about the reaction of the Orange County theater community when Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.
Harold Pinter was considered a long shot for the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. American author Joyce Carol Oates had been mentioned as a candidate by the Nobel rumormongers; so had the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk and the Syrian poet Adonis.
But when the 75-year-old playwright received the writing world’s most prestigious award last week, many in the local theater community were as unsurprised as they were enthusiastic.
“Both the English and American theater since the ’60s really have built upon his foundation,” said Richard Stein, executive director of the Laguna Playhouse.
Pinter influenced generations of playwrights, Stein said, with his revolutionary approach to drama: “A desire to plumb the depths of the seamier side of human experience; the belief that language is really at the heart of theater; and that there’s a poetic resonance to how common people speak, even when what they’re saying is not particularly appealing. In those regards, (David) Mamet and (Sam) Shepard owe a clear debt to Pinter.”
Pinter was among the first playwrights to explore the dangers that lurked beneath even the most banal of surfaces. In his plays, familiar domestic environments could turn into minefields.
“There’s that famous remark that he wrote about the weasel under the cocktail table,” said John Glore, a playwright and dramaturge who serves as South Coast Repertory’s associate artistic director. “That (characteristic) became very influential with writers immediately after him. Shepard (captured) that sense in writing about middle Americans. `Buried Child’ and `True West’ have obvious connections to Pinter.”
For almost half a century, Harold Pinter has been writing plays that maddeningly defy description. It’s easy enough to outline their simple plots — from his first work, “The Room” (1957), to the recent “Celebration,” the absurdist master has focused his attention not on events but on those who control (or are controlled by) them.
The challenge of a Pinter play is trying to figure out what each of his veiled, taciturn characters is after. Beneath the cryptic pauses and elliptical phrases lies a passionate, twisted underworld where everybody wants something — though we’re never sure just what. No other playwright other than Samuel Beckett has used the pause as effectively as Pinter. Those silences always speak volumes. They also identify the playwright’s characters as indisputably English, according to some.
“There’s a sense of holding back to (Pinter’s characters). It has to do with the English character,” said British actor James Warrick, who appeared in a production of Pinter’s “Old Times” at South Coast Repertory in 1997. “You think you know where you are with English people, but often you don’t. There’s a real emotional withholding in the English spirit. We’re not so emotionally exposed as Americans.”
Pinter’s work has been admired and imitated for so long that the hallmarks of his style — pregnant pauses, shadowy intent, belligerence, inexplicable behavior, characters who don’t say what they mean — have become part of modern theater’s lingua franca, according to Glore.
“I think we’re at the point now where there’s a second generation of influence. I don’t know if there are many younger writers out there who say they’re directly influenced by Pinter. Joe Penhall (the author of `Dumb Show,’ which closes today on SCR’s Julianne Argyros Stage) has said that most of the (British) writers of his generation are far more influenced by Americans like Mamet, Shepard and Tarentino than they are by the fathers of modern British drama. But it’s clear that they were influenced by Pinter. I don’t know that Caryl Churchill (“Cloud Nine, “Top Girls”) would claim Pinter as an influence, but I think her drama was possible because of what he wrote.”
Pinter’s dry, exacting minimalism is another aspect of his style that’s so universal its connection to him has been forgotten, Glore suggested. “The precise scoring of language was something that Pinter really pioneered. I think it’s pervasive.”
Though Pinter’s plays can be fearsomely caustic and his political beliefs are passionate — he is a fierce opponent of the Iraq war and a longtime critic of American foreign policy — those qualities are surprisingly absent in person, according to Stein, who met the playwright in the mid-’90s.
“I had produced a Pinter play called `Landscape,’ so I brought a copy of the program to show him. He asked if I would give it to him because he wanted to keep it in his collection. And he wanted me to autograph it!” Stein chuckled. “He was immensely charming and gracious. And when you think of his plays, particularly the rough edges of his early plays, you might not think a man would be so delightful as he was.”
Pinter is publicity-shy to the point of invisibility. His modesty was uppermost when he was told by the Nobel committee last week that he had just won the literature prize. His response, after a long pause, seemed to sum up his life’s work: “I’m speechless.”
