Harold Pinter was a Nobel Prize–winning British playwright, director, actor, and screenwriter. He is one of the most renowned dramatists of the 20th century, esteemed for his inventiveness, originality, and formal innovation.
Pinter was born in Hackney, London to working-class Eastern European Jewish parents. At the Hackney Downs Grammar School, Pinter excelled at sports and took up acting for the first time. After school ended, he avoided enlistment in the military by declaring himself a conscientious objector.
Pinter wrote his first play, The Room, in 1957. It features many elements that would become common in his oeuvre, including a situation that seems quotidian but is charged with ambiguity and menace. It was reviewed favorably and was mounted by the drama department of Bristol University. Pinter then went on to write The Birthday Party, a play of muted anxiety and tension that bordered on the theater of the absurd. The Caretaker (1960) was Pinter's second full-length play and a resounding critical and commercial success. A fusion of the realistic and the symbolic, it led to his third play, The Homecoming. In 1966 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Pinter also wrote plays in the 1970s, including Old Times (1970), No Man's Land (1975), and Betrayal (1978). In the 1980s-2000s, Pinter continued to compose plays but also tried his hand at poetry, screenwriting, and directing. He explained that he wanted to look toward politics at the end of his life, and he remarked that his 29 plays were enough. In 2005, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Pinter died in 2008 of liver cancer. In 2011, the Comedy Theatre on Panton Street in the West End was renamed The Harold Pinter Theatre. Pinter's work is so influential that his name has been used to explain certain settings or situations: The "Pinter Pause" describes silences used to convey characters' motivations or personalities, and the term "Pinteresque" refers to an inconclusive end to a comedy of subtle menace and absurdity.
By the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, Harold Pinter was recognized as one of the most widely-performed and influential contemporary playwrights. Born to a Jewish family in the Hackney area of East London in 1930,...
Harold Pinter was working as an actor in England when he stayed briefly at a dilapidated boardinghouse that would serve as his inspiration for both The Birthday Party and The Room. As he has explained in many published works, he wrote more from...
The Caretaker is one of playwright Harold Pinter's most popular plays, and certainly one of the 20th century's most notable works of the stage. It is Pinter's second full-length play, but his first major success. Critics delve into its historical,...
The Dumb Waiter is a one-act play written by English playwright Harold Pinter in 1957. The short play is set in a single basement room. There are only two characters: Gus and Ben, hitmen waiting for a target to arrive.
The play has elements of...
The Homecoming is one of Nobel laureate Harold Pinter’s most compelling and critically acclaimed plays. Disturbing, enigmatic, and darkly comic, it has been staged continually since its 1965 debut. Pinter’s own words in 1970 when accepting the...
Moonlight is a one-act play by Harold Pinter which was first produced in September 1993 at the Almeida Theater in London. The play is divided into seventeen different sections which take place in three “playing areas” of the set: the...
Although Harold Pinter's No Man's Land was by no means one of his most well-known or popular plays, it was widely read, viewed, and well-received when first produced and published in 1975. A tells the story of Hirst, a man in his sixties. Hirst is...
Old Times is categorized as one of the Harold Pinter’ “memory plays” that characterized his evolution and development in the 1970’s through a series of productions that took a step back from the more cerebral experimentation of the playwright’s...
Harold Pinter's The Room is a tragicomic play about an anxious woman whose humble life is disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious messenger whose presence portends death. Written in 1957, The Room was Pinter's first play.
Living in a single-room...
