Harold Pinter - RIP

[B. Goren.]

Harold Pinter - the master of suspense - leaves the stage

London - Harold Pinter, the anti-establishment dramatist and political campaigner whose death at age 78 was announced Thursday, was widely regarded as one of Britain's greatest contemporary playwrights.

Pinter, a radical never afraid to speak his mind, mixed passion with moral vigour and employed irony, brilliant rhetoric and black humour in dialogues peppered with pregnant pauses and suspense in what became known as the "Pinteresque drama."

To read more...

[BillF]

Desperately trying (without success) to think up a jazz slant on Harold Pinter.

Albums that never were: Shelly Manne & His Friends Play The Birthday Party.

: Stan Tracey Quartet with Bobby Wellins, Music from The Caretaker.

[Elissa]

Actually he was a huge Monkophile. In the brilliant filmed version of the Homecoming (dir. Peter Hall w Cyril Cusack, Ian Holm, the (at the time) Mrs. Pinter, Vivian Merchant) all the interstitial music is Monk's.

Also they shared the same birthday, October 10.

Edited December 25, 2008 by Elissa

[AllenLowe]

the Homecoming was, to me, the most important play of the post Waiting for Godot period - changed my life when I first saw a production of it around 1970.

he had his own little sex scandal around 30 years when he abandoned his wife the actress Vivian Merchant for a younger babe, as I recall-

also, politically to the left, I believe heavily involved in Amnesty International

Edited December 25, 2008 by AllenLowe

[Elissa]

For Antonia Fraser

[AllenLowe]

thank you - I can't emphasize enough how great a play the Homecoming is - many playwrights of that era were in search of a way to deal with language and internal action, post-Beckett; the American solution (a la Albee) was shallow and false; Pinter showed the way -

just to mention - Merchant had a wonderfully hilarious turn as the Inspector's wife in one of the last Hitchcock films, a daffy lady who cooked increasingly bad food - can;t think of the film, which I didn't think was very good; I think it was Hitchcock's next-to-last -

Edited December 25, 2008 by AllenLowe

[Elissa]

I think I just heard that Eartha Kitt passed too?!!?

Edited December 25, 2008 by Elissa

[kinuta]

thank you - I can't emphasize enough how great a play the Homecoming is - many playwrights of that era were in search of a way to deal with language and internal action, post-Beckett; the American solution (a la Albee) was shallow and false; Pinter showed the way -

just to mention - Merchant had a wonderfully hilarious turn as the Inspector's wife in one of the last Hitchcock films, a daffy lady who cooked increasingly bad food - can;t think of the film, which I didn't think was very good; I think it was Hitchcock's next-to-last -

The film was 'Frenzy'.

I've long been fascinated by Pinter and have tried to collect as many of his filmed works as possible. Even small forgotten things like 'Turtle Diary' are made special by his unique writing style. The Servant, Accident, The Go Between and The Last Tycoon are among my favourites. I especially treasure my old vhs copy of The Collection with Lawrence Olivier,Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren.

[RonPrice]

THREE PEOPLE IN A ROOM

When I entered my teens in 1957 and Shoghi Effendi died in November of that year, an event of little importance to me then, a young man Harold Pinter was on the edge of a career which led him to become the foremost living dramatist of the last half of the twentieth century. Pinter, then, was on no importance at all to me. I was only 13. In 1957 Pinter was pursuing his private vision and experimenting with dramatic form; he was also very poor and lived in a slum. He saw the personal and the political as a seemless blend; private life he saw as much a form of power-politics as was the partisan politics of government. We see this in his work The Dumb Waiter which was first put on in 1959, the year I became a Baha'i. By April 1960 he had become famous due to his play The Caretaker which he had written in the autumn of 1959 during October, the month I had joined a movement that was claiming to be the emerging world religion. At that time the movement had about 700 members in Canada. Like Pinter, I was young then. -Ron Price with thanks to Michael Billington, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, Faber and Faber, London, 1996, pp.1-113.

You did so well, Harold,

to take your life and thought

and put it on the stage making

you so famous and so rich, eh?

I've taken my life, Harold, and

put it into poetry, my story, one

which acquires more than a little

significance due to its association

with this emerging world religion.

Perhaps, with ingenuity, I could take

John and Hattie Dixon and Nancy

Campbell and put them in a lounge

room with some cheese-cake and

apple-pie, add some of those birds

flying over Akka and show how

that central core of my life developed

subtly, even uneventfully, with the real

communication taking place without

words—as you put it so well, Harold.1

Thank you Harold for all your work.

1 Part of Pinter's philosophy of life as conveyed in The Caretaker and summarized by Alrene Sykes, "Introduction," The Caretaker, Harold Pinter, Hicks Smith and Sons, Sydney, 1960, p.3. This play was centered around three people in a room.

Ron Price

18 September 2001

(updated for Internet

On: 26/12/08)

[paul secor]

Saw a wonderful performance of The Birthday Party when I was in College. Thanks for that, Mr. Pinter.

[J.A.W.]

Loved his plays, especially The Servant and The Birthday Party. One of the great playwrights of the 20th Century, along with Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee and a few others.

[Alexander]

One of my favorite live theatre experiences was an evening of one-acts titled "Beckett-Pinter-Mamet." A wonderful evening with one act plays by each author. He will be missed...

[Kalo]

Actually he was a huge Monkophile. In the brilliant filmed version of the Homecoming (dir. Peter Hall w Cyril Cusack, Ian Holm, the (at the time) Mrs. Pinter, Vivian Merchant) all the interstitial music is Monk's.

Also they shared the same birthday, October 10.

They both had a way with a pause, too! Very interesting. Two masters whose silences were as significant as their notes/words.

I'll have to check out the film of Homecoming.