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Harold Pinter.
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Biography EssayHarold Pinter, Britain's most significant playwright since Bernard Shaw, was born in Hackney, a small working-class section just beyond the borders of London's East End. He grew up in a...
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The English playwright Harold Pinter (born 1930) ranks among the foremost postwar British dramatists. A master of menace, he invested his plays with an atmosphere of fear, horror, and mystery.Harold P...
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[This entry was updated by Stephen Grecco (Pennsylvania State University) from his entry in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 315-336.]Harold Pinter, Britain's most s...
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In the following essay, Dick examines the themes in Pinter’s work and considers Pinter's plays in the context of the renaissance of English theater in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
&#x...
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In the following essay, Donoghue strongly objects to the negative vision of life he sees conveyed in Pinter's plays.
Think of Harold Pinter. His published plays are The Room, The Dumb Waiter, T...
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In the following essay, Cohn discusses the retributive role of villains in Pinter's plays
Each of Harold Pinter's four plays ends in the virtual annihilation of an individual. In Pinter&...
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In the following essay, Kerr argues that not only is Pinter an existentialist writer, but that his plays are written in an existentialist manner.
Harold Pinter seems to me the only man working in the ...
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In the following essay, Storch argues that Pinter's plays are about the anxiety and menace Pinter sees at the heart of the bourgeois family.
The shock-tactics of Harold Pinter's dramatur...
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In the following essay, Orley examines the elements of horror and menace in Pinter’s plays
Dramatically, as well as politically, terror and menace are most essential elements of Harold Pinter&#...
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In the following essay, Kunkel explores the grim alienation Pinter's characters represent.
Harold Pinter mounted the challenge to Broadway for two years in a row. The Homecoming (1965), written...
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In the following essay, Morrison argues that Pinter developed a new form of dramatic irony, not the classical irony where the audience knows things the characters do not, but an irony resulting from t...
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In the following essay, Gillen examines the division between the known and the unknown worlds in Pinter's plays.
The current Broadway success of Harold Pinter's Tea Party with its clear ...
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In the following essay, Gordon traces the manner in which Pinter moves from the analytic to the lyrical form of language in his plays.
In the remarkably short time between 1957 and 1965 Harold Pinter ...
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In the following essay, Rickert argues that contrary to Pinter’s assertions, he is not a conventional playwright, and does not have the traditional aim of exploring social forces or analyzing s...
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In the following essay, Kennedy surveys Pinter's use of language, examining how he abstracts it from concrete meaning and makes language a dramatic rather than discursive element in his plays.
...
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In the following essay, Thomson provides an overview of Pinter’s plays, declaring the earlier ones authentic and superior to the later, which he finds formula-driven and lacking in dramatic dri...
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In the following essay, Hinchliffe offers synopses of Pinter's works and of critical responses to them.
The title of this chapter was first applied to Pinter by Irving Wardle in Encore (Septemb...
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In the following essay, Hinchliffe provides an overview of Pinter’s plays from No Man’s Land to Players.
No Man's Land opened on 23 April 1975 and marked the culmination of twenty...
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In the following essay, Mengel examines the themes of isolation and loneliness in A Kind of Alaska, Victoria Station and Family Voices.
Harold Pinter's Other Places opened at the National Theat...
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In the following essay, Nightingale examines Pinter's political commitments and argues that their expression in his later plays lessens the quality of those plays.
Ten or twenty years ago Harol...
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In the following essay, Esslin traces the depiction of cruelty in Pinter's plays from the metaphysical realm in his early plays to the actual realm in later plays as Pinter became more politica...
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In the following essay, Rose explores the influence of the interior and exterior urban environment on Pinter’s plays.
Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, often used the maxim, “Every...
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In the following essay, Hynes explores Pinter's visions of morality and values.
Viewers and critics have applied any number of adjectives to Pinter and his plays. Among the terms used, usually ...
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In the following essay, Saltz examines the difference between concept and meaning in the language of Pinter's plays.
When Goldberg grills Stanley in The Birthday Party about whether “the...
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In the following essay, Knowles surveys the plays written between 1984 and 1993, emphasizing the continuity of themes from Pinter’s earlier, detached period to the later, overtly engaged plays....
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In the following essay, Knowles explores Pinter's use of the Pygmalion-Galatea myth as a theme in several of his plays.
The printed text of A Kind of Alaska1 is preceded by a note indicating th...
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In the following review, Alvarez states that The Room and The Dumb Waiter are about the “impossibility of communication.”
Harold Pinter is … a playwright without a language, but d...
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In the following review, Worsley describes Pinter as an off-beat playwright of considerable promise.
A new play by a new playwright, The Birthday Party, at the Lyric, Hammersmith, invited us to peer b...
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In the following review, Hewes commends the San Francisco Actor's Workshop for maintaining a roster of quality offerings, and praises its production of The Birthday Party.
What happens to most ...
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In the following review, Beaufort praises the mood of “macabre menace” Pinter evokes in a production of The Birthday Party, which he also directed.
Meg: What do they do then?
Petey: The...
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In the following explication of The Birthday Party, Lesser compares Pinter's worldview to that of Kafka's.
One cannot, and probably should not, write about Pinter without facing his simi...
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In the following essay, Kaufman argues that the game of blindman's buff, central to The Birthday Party, provides an expressive structure for what Pinter sees as inherent human traits: a struggl...
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In the following essay, Bogumil looks at the role and meaning of games in The Birthday Party.
The sense of post-war malaise and uncertainty is evoked through the use of gameplaying in Harold Pinter&#x...
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In the following review, Oliver gives high praise to The Dumb Waiter and The Collection,.
The problem this week is to give you some idea of the brilliance and originality and wild humor of The Dumbwai...
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In the following review, Alvarez complains that, despite an excellent production, The Caretaker is disappointing because, in it, Pinter repeats what he has “already done better in other plays.&...
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In the following review, Simon can find nothing of value in The Caretaker.
Not since Joanna Southcote announced that she would give birth to the Messiah, have there been such public pangs and heaving&...
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In the following essay, Minogue argues that reviewers of The Caretaker focused too much on Pinter's style and ignored the content of the play.
A man went rushing into a building. ‘Fire! ...
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In the following essay, Murphy focuses on The Caretaker, explaining the importance of attending to action indicated by the stage directions as much as to the dialogue in Pinter's plays.
Few mod...
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In the following review, Bryden praises Pinter's skill as a playwright but wonders about the depth of his concerns, or of his accomplishment.
With a click of lights, a room jumps into being. An...
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In the following review, Benedictus suggests that The Homecoming is a metaphorical representation of Pinter's relation to playwriting and to his audience.
Surely Mr. Harold Pinter is something ...
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In the following essay, Morris discusses The Homecoming as a comedy of manners with a tragic theme.
Peer Gynt. … You seem busy here today—a christening? Or a wedding feast?
Man in Mourn...
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In the following essay, States examines the use and significance of irony in characterization, situation, and language in Pinter's The Homecoming.
Teddy: You wouldn't understand my works...
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In the following essay, Nelson explicates The Homecoming by associating it with the biblical stories of the Prodigal Son and Ruth, and with Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.
Without exception...
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In the following essay, Warner argues that The Homecoming asks the audience to reevaluate their expectations and values.
No one denied the brilliance of the Royal Shakespeare Company's producti...
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In the following review of Silence and Landscaping, Hughes discusses Pinter's ideas about fear of communication and examines the significance of silence in his plays.
Harold Pinter surely must ...
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In the following review, Kauffmann applauds the “gentleness” he sees in Silence and Landscape.
Harold Pinter's new short plays reveal a new Pinter. He doesn't produce much,...
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In the following review, Hewes finds that Silence and Landscape lack dramatic tension and development.
Ten years ago when British playwright Harold Pinter first came to this country with his wonderful...
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In the following essay, Richardson considers whether the two apparently separate narrators in Landscape form one integrated narrative, and if “narrativity” is the result of chronology, c...
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In the following essay, Aylwin reviews the way characters in Old Times determine their identities, and interact with each other on the basis of their memories of the past.
In the Sunday papers followi...
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In the following essay, Stamm praises The Hothouse, an early play Pinter originally suppressed, but then produced in 1980.
The Hothouse was first presented at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in April 1...
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In the following review, Abbott offers high praise for Pinter's Moonlight, and discusses its central themes of living versus dead and past versus present.
Let's get one question out of t...
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In the following essay, Knowles discusses references to the ancient myth of Pygmalion in A Kind of Alaska, as well as several of Pinter's other plays. Knowles asserts that Pinter's refer...
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In the following review, Gill asserts that Pinter's Ashes to Ashes ultimately does not make sense.
On first nights, the Ivy—that communal greenroom for the boulevard arts—always h...
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In the following review, Rusinko asserts that Collected Poems and Prose demonstrates that Pinter is an accomplished poet, as well as a dramatist.
Of the twenty-eight poems that appeared in the first c...
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In the following review, Jensen discusses the theme of the confusion of memory and desire in Pinter's Ashes to Ashes.
Two armchairs, two side-tables, two lamps and a large window; a man and a w...
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In the following essay, Steyn discusses elements of political commentary in Pinter's plays.
Harold Pinter likes to tell a story against himself. A year or two back, he was flying to Miami and, ...
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In the following essay, Greer offers a brief, negative assessment of Pinter's career and reputation as a dramatist.
The London theater has been passing through a persistent scarcity of good new...
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In the following review of The Life and Works of Harold Pinter, by Michael Billington, Barnwell criticizes the author for providing an overly laudatory biography of Pinter.
In the mid-1950s, an Englis...
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In the following review, Kellaway offers praise for Pinter's plays A Kind of Alaska, The Collection, and The Lover.
The three short plays by Harold Pinter now at the Donmar all lead to the same...
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In the following review of Three by Harold Pinter, Morley praises A Kind of Alaska, The Collection, and The Lover, asserting that this “Pinter treble of unresolved menace is a remarkable tribut...
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In the following review of Various Voices, Scammell asserts that Pinter is England's greatest living playwright.
Harold Pinter is far and away our greatest living playwright. What the plays tel...
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In the following review, Morley comments that Pinter's Betrayal is stylish but ultimately empty.
Of all Harold Pinter's plays, his 1978 Betrayal about a three-cornered affair, loosely ba...
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In the following essay, Stone argues against Pinter's vocal public support for Kurdish nationalism in Turkey.
Trouble in Turkey? All aboard for Midnight Express. What damage that film has done....
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In the following review of Various Voices, a collection of Pinter's poems and prose, Imlah observes that its principal value is as a companion to Pinter's plays.
Assured of his standing ...
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In the following review, Sterling asserts that Various Voices provides valuable insight into Pinter's work and is essential reading for scholars and students of British drama. He further observ...
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In the following review, O'Toole discusses the development of Pinter's political commitments as expressed in his plays.
1.
In early-seventeenth-century England, in the midst of what was ...
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In the following interview, Riddell discusses Pinter's polemical stance on many political issues.
As Harold Pinter wrote recently, in an open letter to the Prime Minister, he was “chuffe...
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In the following review, Cusac applauds Various Voices, observing that it provides valuable insight about Pinter and his plays.
I have a confession to make. Well, “confession” may be the...
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In the following review of several radio broadcasts of plays by Pinter, Vestey asserts that Pinter's dramas are deeply unsatisfying.
I've never forgotten a remark the director Bryan Forb...
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In the following essay, Jays laments the neglect of Jewish writing in British theater. Jays comments that Pinter's Jewish background is rarely mentioned in critical discussion of his plays.
Har...
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In the following review, Wassenaar applauds Pinter's stage adaptation of Marcel Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu. Wassenaar discusses the themes of snobbery and sexual...
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In the following interview, Pinter discusses his political orientation and his treatment of the themes of power and powerlessness in his plays.
Several months back, a colleague handed me a copy of the...
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In the following essay, Copeland asserts that the time has come for a major reevaluation of Pinter's career and of his legacy to British theater.
The essential ingredients rarely change: A room...
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In the following essay, Gussow provides an overview of Pinter's life and career.
Harold Pinter has always been able to surprise himself as well as his audience. Several years ago, he said with ...
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In the following interview, Pinter discusses his work with Carey Perloff, a director of several of Pinter's plays.
Harold Pinter is telling me about the characters in his extraordinary new sati...
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In the following review, Mendelsohn provides an overview of theater festivals paying tribute to Pinter, asserting that the Harold Pinter Festival ultimately “exposed Pinter's weaknesses ...
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In the following review, King applauds recent productions of Pinter's One for the Road, Mountain Language, and Ashes to Ashes.
Eve Ensler's Necessary Targets, in its world premiere at Ha...
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In the following essay, Jays offers a brief overview of Pinter's screenplays.
“I'll tell you what I am,” snarls Dirk Bogarde. “I'm a gentleman's gentle...
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In the following review, Morley comments that the stage adaptation of Pinter's novel The Dwarfs doesn't really work as a play.
“Farce,” the late Ben Travers once told me, &...
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In the following review, Ford praises Landscape as “one of the most resonant of Harold Pinter's shorter pieces.”
Landscape is one of the most resonant of Harold Pinter's sh...
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In the following essay, Norrick and Baker assert that much of the humor in Pinter's early plays derives from his masterful use of typical, everyday speech.
In his “Writing for Myself,&#x...
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In the following essay, Dick examines the themes in Pinter’s work and considers Pinter's plays in the context of the renaissance of English theater in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
&#x...
Read more
In the following essay, Gordon traces the manner in which Pinter moves from the analytic to the lyrical form of language in his plays.
In the remarkably short time between 1957 and 1965 Harold Pinter ...
Read more
In the following essay, Rickert argues that contrary to Pinter’s assertions, he is not a conventional playwright, and does not have the traditional aim of exploring social forces or analyzing s...
Read more
In the following essay, Kennedy surveys Pinter's use of language, examining how he abstracts it from concrete meaning and makes language a dramatic rather than discursive element in his plays.
...
Read more
In the following essay, Thomson provides an overview of Pinter’s plays, declaring the earlier ones authentic and superior to the later, which he finds formula-driven and lacking in dramatic dri...
Read more
In the following essay, Hinchliffe offers synopses of Pinter's works and of critical responses to them.
The title of this chapter was first applied to Pinter by Irving Wardle in Encore (Septemb...
Read more
In the following essay, Mengel examines the themes of isolation and loneliness in A Kind of Alaska, Victoria Station and Family Voices.
Harold Pinter's Other Places opened at the National Theat...
Read more
In the following essay, Nightingale examines Pinter's political commitments and argues that their expression in his later plays lessens the quality of those plays.
Ten or twenty years ago Harol...
Read more
In the following essay, Esslin traces the depiction of cruelty in Pinter's plays from the metaphysical realm in his early plays to the actual realm in later plays as Pinter became more politica...
Read more
In the following essay, Donoghue strongly objects to the negative vision of life he sees conveyed in Pinter's plays.
Think of Harold Pinter. His published plays are The Room, The Dumb Waiter, T...
Read more
In the following essay, Rose explores the influence of the interior and exterior urban environment on Pinter’s plays.
Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, often used the maxim, “Every...
Read more
In the following essay, Hynes explores Pinter's visions of morality and values.
Viewers and critics have applied any number of adjectives to Pinter and his plays. Among the terms used, usually ...
Read more
In the following essay, Saltz examines the difference between concept and meaning in the language of Pinter's plays.
When Goldberg grills Stanley in The Birthday Party about whether “the...
Read more
In the following essay, Knowles surveys the plays written between 1984 and 1993, emphasizing the continuity of themes from Pinter’s earlier, detached period to the later, overtly engaged plays....
Read more
In the following essay, Knowles explores Pinter's use of the Pygmalion-Galatea myth as a theme in several of his plays.
The printed text of A Kind of Alaska1 is preceded by a note indicating th...
Read more
In the following review, Worsley describes Pinter as an off-beat playwright of considerable promise.
A new play by a new playwright, The Birthday Party, at the Lyric, Hammersmith, invited us to peer b...
Read more
In the following essay, Cohn discusses the retributive role of villains in Pinter's plays
Each of Harold Pinter's four plays ends in the virtual annihilation of an individual. In Pinter&...
Read more
In the following review, Bryden praises Pinter's skill as a playwright but wonders about the depth of his concerns, or of his accomplishment.
With a click of lights, a room jumps into being. An...
Read more
In the following essay, Kerr argues that not only is Pinter an existentialist writer, but that his plays are written in an existentialist manner.
Harold Pinter seems to me the only man working in the ...
Read more
In the following review of Silence and Landscaping, Hughes discusses Pinter's ideas about fear of communication and examines the significance of silence in his plays.
Harold Pinter surely must ...
Read more
In the following review, Kauffmann applauds the “gentleness” he sees in Silence and Landscape.
Harold Pinter's new short plays reveal a new Pinter. He doesn't produce much,...
Read more
In the following review, Hewes finds that Silence and Landscape lack dramatic tension and development.
Ten years ago when British playwright Harold Pinter first came to this country with his wonderful...
Read more
In the following essay, Richardson considers whether the two apparently separate narrators in Landscape form one integrated narrative, and if “narrativity” is the result of chronology, c...
Read more
In the following essay, Storch argues that Pinter's plays are about the anxiety and menace Pinter sees at the heart of the bourgeois family.
The shock-tactics of Harold Pinter's dramatur...
Read more
In the following essay, Orley examines the elements of horror and menace in Pinter’s plays
Dramatically, as well as politically, terror and menace are most essential elements of Harold Pinter&#...
Read more
In the following essay, Kunkel explores the grim alienation Pinter's characters represent.
Harold Pinter mounted the challenge to Broadway for two years in a row. The Homecoming (1965), written...
Read more
In the following essay, Morrison argues that Pinter developed a new form of dramatic irony, not the classical irony where the audience knows things the characters do not, but an irony resulting from t...
Read more
In the following essay, Gillen examines the division between the known and the unknown worlds in Pinter's plays.
The current Broadway success of Harold Pinter's Tea Party with its clear ...
Read more
Critical Essay by James R. Hollis
Harold Pinter has listened to the labored pulse of his century, limned its temper, and perhaps more importantly, recreated its frightening silences. In a time which T...
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Critical Essay by Gareth Lloyd Evans
If we seek, in twentieth-century criticism, for anything approaching the extent of the detailed verbal analysis of Pinter's plays, we find it only in commen...
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Critical Essay by Stanley Kauffmann
I speak carefully when I say that [The Proust Screenplay is] incomparably the best screen adaptation ever made of a great work and that it is in itself a work of ge...
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Critical Essay by John Updike
One approaches "The Proust Screenplay," by Harold Pinter …, determined not to complain that Proust's language has vanished. How could it not, ...
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Critical Essay by Terry Curtis Fox
[Harold Pinter, the] obscure, difficult playwright of the early '60s has emerged, two decades later, as our foremost exponent of naturalism. Pinter, we are to...
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Critical Essay by Katherine H. Burkman
Though Pinter is distinctly a poetic rather than a problem-solving playwright, he is by his own proud admission in large part a traditionalist. Despite his lack ...
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Critical Essay by Roger Scruton
Although Beckett and Pinter have less in common than meets the eye, nevertheless they share a fundamental premise: their characters are raw, vulnerable, dangerously exp...
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Critical Essay by Mary Jane Miller
A radio play which uses the qualities of sound and silence to the fullest extent cannot be translated into another medium without damage. If such plays use those att...
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Critical Essay by Russell Davies
Harold Pinter started off unluckily. He arrived on the London stage at a time when it was no longer fashionable for playwrights merely to exercise their gifts. They ha...
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Critical Essay by Rudolf Stamm
[Pinter's note in the 1980 text of The Hothouse] places The Hothouse between The Birthday Party and The Caretaker. What may appear surprising in this chronologica...
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Critical Essay by Martin Esslin
Which way is our leading dramatist going? Is Harold Pinter moving away from the extravagantly 'Pinteresque' situations and language of his earlier style&#...
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Harold Pinter's play, The Homecoming, represents a series of urban characters that involves in the family relationships whose prime interest is in wining dominance over another, and the depiction of g...
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Ruth is very central to the play as she is a contrast to the rest of the characters in the play and is a very powerful character. She exerts her power on the family through her sexuality unlike the re...
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Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Critical Essay by Kay Dick
Critical Analysis of "the Homecoming"
