The Pinter of Our Discontent

Harold Pinter in 2003

Derek Hudson / Getty

• Share

Harold Pinter was speaking to the press just after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. "I was told today that one of the Sky channels [the satellite news network owned by Rupert Murdoch] said this morning that Harold Pinter is dead.' Then they changed their mind and said, 'No, he's won the Nobel Prize.' So I've risen from the dead."

This true-life joke is repeated in Charlie Kaufman's film about a madly ambitious theater man, Synecdoche, New York. So people have been anticipating the death of one of the 20th century's most revered and mysterious playwrights — the near equal to his fellow Nobelist Samuel Beckett, with plays that achieved far more commercial success than Beckett's — for quite some time. Now they can stop. Pinter, who had long been ailing from cancer, died on Christmas Eve at 78. (See the top 10 plays and musicals of 2008.)

The most appropriate tribute would be an hour and a half of silence. For Pinter was the master, virtually the copyright holder, of the pregnant pause that never gives birth. Words hurt in his plays, but the withholding of them can inflict deeper wounds — on the characters in his plays and on some of perplexed members of the audience. "Pinteresque" came to suggest an edgy break in an uncomfortable conversation, and the playwright tended to these ellipses like a doting mother. "I did change a silence to a pause," he said about a scene in one of his plays. "It was a rewrite."

In such acclaimed plays as The Birthday Party (1958), The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1966), Old Times (1971), No Man's Land (1975) and Betrayal (1971), Pinter radically altered and energized the traditional dynamic of the stage. It was no longer simply the place where people spoke; it was where not speaking could be far more suggestive, dangerous, theatrical, eloquent. Like Beckett, he renounced the flossy rhetoric of such postwar playwrights as Christopher Fry and Jean Anouilh for a back-to-basics starkness — a two-men-on-a-stage simplicity that Aeschylus would have admired. In its citation, the Swedish Academy said Pinter "restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles."

This unease was a handsome fit for serious drama in the early Atomic Age. When the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. both had The Bomb, what was the point in pretense or courtesy? Pinter's quietly murderous insolence was the theatrical equivalent to Nikita Khrushchev's shoe-banging at the United Nations. Good manners were the creamy lie the great powers poured on the toxic gruel of their realpolitik. The only counteroffensive was to write plays in which people misbehaved, tortured each other; for the postwar generation, writing what the Cambridge Review called his "skull-beneath-the-skin" plays, he was the Pinter of Our Discontent. Back then, his works were taken as murky dramas; now they look like snarky, superior comedies of bad manners. (Pinter half-acknowledged this reading of his works, saying that The Caretaker was "funny, up to a point.")

When Mel Gussow, the New York Times theater critic who was Pinter's most assiduous American promoter, asked the author, "Do your plays have more to do with your life than we know?", he replied, "They have more to do with my life than I know." In other words, an artist, no matter his aim, is always writing his autobiography. He could also have said that each production of a play creates its own unique meaning. When Old Times had its premiere in London, with Colin Blakeley, Vivien Merchant and Dorothy Tutin as the threesome, it seemed the story of a man victimized by two women; in the Broadway version later that year, when the stars were Robert Shaw, Dorothy Tutin and Mary Ure, the man seemed the predator, the women his prey.

Both times, though, they were splendid eviscerations of married life. So we may say that "meaning" doesn't matter if the work creates its own world, if it lives onstage, as Pinter's plays so vibrantly and mischievously did. Under all the mysterioso legerdemain, he was the Shakespeare of rhetorical bullying. The bickering men in The Caretaker and Old Times, the quarreling couples in Old Times and Betrayal, the desperate or rancorous family in The Birthday Party and The Homecoming — the rivalries and recriminations of all these mean creatures sparked instant and lasting theatrical pyrotechnics. Who could ask for more of a modern playwright?

See TIME's Person of the Year, People Who Mattered, and more.

See pictures of movie costumes.