HAROLD PINTER:HAROLD PINTER, who has died aged 78, was the most influential, provocative and poetic English dramatist of his generation.
He enjoyed parallel careers as actor, screenwriter and director and was also, especially in recent years, a polemicist campaigning against abuses of human rights. It is for his plays that he will be best remembered and for his ability to create dramatic poetry out of everyday speech. It is a measure of Pinter's power that early on he spawned the adjective "Pinteresque", suggesting a cryptically mysterious situation imbued with hidden menace.
Pinter was born into a Jewish family in the London borough of Hackney. His grandparents had fled persecution in Poland and Odessa. His father, Jack, was a tailor whose family had artistic leanings: his mother, Frances, came from a convivial, extrovert and spiritually sceptical clan. Pinter was an only child: as a boy, he conducted conversations in the garden with imaginary friends. But such circumstances conspired to give him a sense of solitude, separation and loss: the perfect breeding-ground for a dramatist.
He was evacuated to Cornwall at the age of nine where he became aware of the cruelty of schoolboys in isolation. Back in London during the Blitz, he absorbed the dramatic nature of wartime life: the fear, the sexual desperation, the sense that everything could end tomorrow. All this fed into his work.
From his teens Pinter devoured Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Eliot, Lawrence, Woolf and Hemingway. He had a gift for friendship: he became the centre of an itinerant, intellectually voracious Hackney clan - also numbering Henry Woolf, Mick Goldstein and Morris Wernick. He fell under the spell of a teacher, Joe Brearley, whose passion for poetry and drama fired his imagination. Under Brearley's direction, he played Romeo and Macbeth at Hackney Downs Grammar School; he was a good enough actor to get a grant to study at RADA, which he detested and soon left.
Pinter's suspicion of authority was manifested in a noted incident in autumn 1948. Receiving his call-up papers for national service, he registered as a conscientious objector, risking imprisonment. He was summoned before a series of increasingly Kafkaesque military tribunals, in the end escaping with a fine. The matter epitomised Pinter's nonconformity, independence and suspicion of the state.
Pinter's early determination, however, was to be an actor. After a second spell at drama school, he joined Anew McMaster's Shakespearean Irish touring company in 1951 and later worked with Donald Wolfit's company in Hammersmith. By the mid-1950s he was leading a strenuous double-life. On the one hand, there was the aspiring actor slogging round the weekly repertory (rep) circuit and filling in with odd jobs. On the other, there was the closet writer penning poems, prose sketches and an autobiographical novel about Hackney life eventually published as The Dwarfs (1990).
He was always hard up: the only consolation was that after 1956 his troubles were shared by his first wife, Vivien Merchant, a Manchester girl who was a minor star on the rep circuit.
The turning-point came in 1957 when one of Pinter's old Hackney friends, Henry Woolf, asked him to write a play for Bristol University's drama department. The result was The Room and it reveals Pinter staking out his own particular territory: the play shows an anxious recluse resisting the insidious pressures of the outside world, and artfully blends comedy and menace.
It was a staggeringly confident debut which attracted the attention of a young producer, Michael Codron, who decided to present Pinter's next play, The Birthday Party, at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1958. The result was one of the most famous disasters in post-war British theatre. The play was dismissed by the daily critics and taken off at the end of the week. Pinter's only consolation was that Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times wrote an encomium claiming that Pinter possessed "the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London".
Pinter not only survived this disaster, but showed he had found his dramatic voice. Using many of the devices of the rep thriller, he had produced a work that was comic, disturbing, strangely unresolved and deeply political in its plea for resistance to social conformity. Despite its initial failure, it brought Pinter a series of new commissions.
Pinter was an instinctively political writer. Proof came with The Hothouse, written in 1958 but not produced until 1980, a savage farce set in a state-run "rest-home" which aims to turn the dissident inmates into model citizens.
The play that finally secured Pinter's reputation was The Caretaker, first produced at the Arts Theatre in 1960. The same critics who dismissed The Birthday Party found masterly technical skill and thunderstorm tension in The Caretaker. What was largely missed at the time, however, was Pinter's ability to find hidden poetry in everyday speech: arguably his greatest contribution to modern drama.
The Caretaker was a turning-point for Pinter. It gave him fame and security. It prompted all sorts of exciting commissions. It also, in time, led to the unravelling of his marriage. Like many of Pinter's plays, the drama was triggered by personal experience: in this case, that of living in a house in Chiswick owned by an absentee builder whose handyman brother one day brought back a vagrant who was eventually expelled. Vivien Merchant hated the play because she felt it was a betrayal of the brother who had shown the struggling Pinters a great kindness. She realised that the success of The Caretaker meant a decisive shift in the balance of marital power. Nevertheless Vivien became, in the early 1960s, the embodiment of a certain kind of female Pinter character, black-stockinged and high-heeled and combining external gentility and inner passion: a character seen, in various forms, in his Night School, The Collection, The Lover, Tea Party and reaching its fulfilment in Ruth in The Homecoming in 1965.
Pinter's attitude to women was always a source of debate. Some saw in his work a fetishistic exploitation of female sexuality, others regarded him as a cryptic feminist who celebrated women's strength and resilience. Both arguments may be valid. Pinter certainly adored women and, as his marriage to Vivien declined, he engaged in a number of affairs.
Power and sex were always two of Pinter's classic themes. In the 1960s he explored them in cinema as much as theatre. His greatness as a playwright has obscured his mastery of screenwriting; just as in the theatre he had found the perfect interpreter in Peter Hall, so in the cinema he found a kindred spirit in director Joseph Losey. The greatest of their collaborations remains The Servant (1963), in which Dirk Bogarde's working-class predator balefully exploits the infantile dependence and sexual ambivalence of James Fox's master. But in Accident (1967), Pinter explored a complex network of erotic relationships against the background of an Oxford summer. Sex and class again collide in The Go-Between (1968), in which Julie Christie's heroine pursues a clandestine affair with Alan Bates's tenant-farmer. All three films were based on novels; all bear Pinter's unmistakeable imprint.
The plays Landscape and Silence, in 1969, took the form of poetically interwoven monologues. This was the start of Pinter's later period in which the plays not only became starker in setting and bleaker in tone but also more preoccupied with memory. Pinter had always been fascinated by the way we use an idealised past as a consolation for an unhappy present.
In 1975 Pinter's marriage broke up and he went to live with historian Antonia Fraser, who in 1980 became his second wife. Pinter's life with Fraser, the wife of a Tory MP, helped to sharpen his fascination with politics.
His plays had always dealt with the intricacies of domestic power. Now his more secure private life enabled him to turn his attention to power-games in the wider public arena. Campaigning actress Peggy Ashcroft in 1973 encouraged him to voice his opposition to US involvement in the overthrow of Chile's President Allende. It was only in the mid-1980s that he started to express strong feelings about torture, human rights and double-standards of the Western democracies in dramatic form.
The best of all Pinter's late political plays is Ashes to Ashes (1996), a hauntingly elusive work that starts with a man's nagging enquiries about a woman's lover but that almost imperceptibly opens up to admit Auschwitz, Bosnia and the whole landscape of 20th century atrocity.
When he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2005, Pinter delivered his acceptance speech by video, sitting in a wheelchair, with a rug over his knees and framed by an image of his younger self. He made a passionate and astonishing speech attacking the US - made all the more powerful because it was delivered in a husky rasp.
Pinter himself was full of contradictions. He had a reputation for being short-tempered; it is true he could flare up if he encountered some thoughtlessly expressed political opinion. Almost alone amongst famous dramatists, he remained close to the friends of his youth: in his case the Hackney gang.
Harold Pinter: born October 10th, 1930; died December 24th, 2008