This year’s Nobel Prize winning playwright, Harold Pinter, is a fiercely vocal critic of the war against Iraq — “we have a clear obligation, which is to resist,” he said in a speech at a Lobby of Parliament in the House of Commons in 2003 — but the most powerful effects in his plays are the silen-ces. They are so powerful that they have long had their own celebrated adjective to describe them: they are Pinteresque. But then, as Pinter said in 1962, there are two kinds of silence. “One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.” The ideal introduction to any play, I think, is to see it performed well before one reads the script. This is perhaps more true of Pinter than of any other playwright I can think of, because it is in performance that the silences speak most clearly. Born in Hackney, in 1930, the son of Jewish working-class parents, Pinter not only faced East London anti-Semitism in his childhood but also lived through World War II and the bombing of London. His political views were sharply articulated from the beginning, when he took a stand as a conscientious objector. After studying acting and working in a travelling repertory, he began writing plays in 1957. Early poetry, along with acting, gave him a special understanding of both words and stagecraft. The Room, his first play, was a one-acter that began in a seemingly commonplace way but grew to be filled with inexplicable menace, ending in a burst of fury. Pinter’s first full-length play to be performed was The Birthday Party, about Stanley, hiding in a seaside room until two men come to fetch him. Then came the other great plays, one by one, about power struggles along the lines of class, gender, sexuality, mental illness and more, including The Caretaker, The Homecoming, Old Times, and Betrayal, about relationships, friendship, and identity. Later plays, like Mountain Language, have been more overtly polemical; after all, he has been a consistent, articulate critic of the abuse of state power; and since September 11, 2001, he has become more and more outspoken as a critic of US and UK foreign policy. His website, www.haroldpinter.org, introduces his central concerns as a writer and as a citizen: “In 1958 I wrote the following: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’ I believe that these assertions still make sense.” With twenty-one screenplays, twenty-seven theatre productions, hard-edged poetry and trenchant political criticism, Pinter has been actor, film writer, theatre director, poet, and political activist; but his 29 plays present his most enduring contribution to the world.
