RIP Harold Pinter

Oh man, that's sad.  Harold Pinter died last night at the age of 78.  Here's the NYTimes obit.   I love Harold Pinter' plays, and always have since I first saw a production of The Caretaker at The Studio when I was a teenager.  I had picked up that Grove edition of The Birthday Party / The Room at a used bookshop the year before and never read it, but after I saw The Caretaker I had this moment of who the hell is this guy?  I love this!

Pinter has the curious distinction of being an almost-universally-beloved playwright who is also really good and quite challenging. That almost never happens, but there is something about the purity of his voice as a writer, it's uniqueness, its discomfort, its unexpected humor, combined with his honesty that makes his plays appealing to all. It's an old saw amongst theatre artist that we like to ask questions instead of providing answers.  Pinter's plays actually did that to devastating, uncomfortable, and occasionally hilarious effect.  Even the less ambiguous and more overtly political works- particularly Mountain Language and One For The Road-  avoided specific topicality while delving deeper than a sub-thirty minute one act really should.

Given how famously distinctive Pinter's voice as a writer was (so distinctive that the work Pinteresque appears in the friggin' OED), it's remarkable how diverse his body of work is from a genre perspective.  His career as a playwright (which ended in 2005 as he left theatre to focus on poetry) was stylistically expansive. And, what many frequently forget when discussing him, is that his writing was devilishly funny when he wanted it to be (The Lover, for example, is both a good Harold Pinter play and one of the weirder, funnier marital sex farces written in the 20th century).   His final three plays were (in reverse chronological order) and adaptation of Proust, and class satire and a claustrophobic journey into one couple, romantic jealousy and the crimes of the twentieth century.  

So thanks, Harold, for the searing mystery of your voice, for broadening a young director-in-the-making's horizons, for endeavoring to tell the truth in a theater.

Comments

[Trée George]

Mountain Language continues to toll in my head long after it had any right to remain. I have not seen the play acted, only read, but in the reading, the words, the characters seem 3D, a brutal transcript rather than an imagined fictional account. How Pinter did this in so few words is his particular genius.

[Lindsay Price]

I will always remember reading 'The Birthday Party' at 16. The heart of the truth is that searing, distinct discomfort. As I think about Pinter this weekend, it seems there is a loss of truth, a loss of discomfort in theatre in general.

[Kerry Reid]

I'm really glad you mentioned "The Lover." I've always loved the use of the milkman in that play -- a character you expect to come back, but he never does.

[Ken]

Pinter was IT for me. The one. For most of my writing life, I've been a two-bit Pinter impersonator, but now I feel I'm finally coming into my own voice. For years, no other playwright's work was good enough--it was all too explicit, too overwrought, telling me things I didn't need to know, and robbing me of the chance to fill in the gaps myself. I've since become more charitable towards other styles of writing, but the template he laid down all those years ago (mystery, apprehension, no excess information, etc.) is still the one hard-wired in my brain. I've known he was sick for a while, so his passing is not really a shock. But it's still a loss.
Goodbye, Harold.