October 10: Harold Pinter

Playwright Harold Pinter, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, was born on this date in London in 1930. He was evacuated from the city during World War II and experienced numerous instances of British anti-Semitism in the course of his childhood, but he was always reluctant to identify passionately as a Jew except in dissent on Jewish political issues such as the 18-year imprisonment of Mordechai Vanunu and Israel’s ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories. Pinter’s twenty-nine plays for the stage include The Birthday Party (1958), The Dumb Waiter (1959), The Homecoming (1964) and other “comedies of menace” that feature pedestrian situations that erupt into absurdity and danger; Landscape (1968), No Man’s Land (1975) and other “memory plays”; and a series of plays on political themes that include Precisely (1983, about nuclear annihilation), The New World Order (1991, about torture), and Celebration (2000, about class culture). Pinter also wrote nearly thirty screenplays for film and television and was very active as an actor. The Nobel Academy cited his work for “uncover[ing] the precipice under everyday prattle and forc[ing] entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” In his Nobel address, he called the U.S. war in Iraq an “arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public,” and condemned Great Britain for its participation in the war.”

“Pinter’s polemic is rude, it knows no boundaries. It ruptures decorum and taste. . . . It is offensive. It is meant to be. It is the voice of a man disgusted with those in power, with the jailers and torturers, with Bush and Blair. He has no fear of standing up in public, no caution that it might be better to keep your head down.” —Michael Kustow