Page 314 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

British Drama

Notes The Birthday Party, was the Harold Pinter’s first commercially-produced, full-length play. He began
writing the work after acting in a theatrical tour, during which, in Eastbourne, England, he had
lived in filthy insane digs. There he became acquainted with a great bulging scrag of a woman and
a man who stayed in the seedy place. The flophouse became the model for the rundown boarding
house of the play and the woman and her tenant the models, respectively, for the characters of Meg
Boles and Stanley Webber. Produced by Michael Codron and David Hall, the play had its world
première at the Arts Theatre, in Cambridge, England, on 28 April 1958, where the play was warmly
received on its pre-London tour, in Oxford and Wolverhampton, where it also met with a positive
reception as the most enthralling experience the Grand Theatre has given us in many months. This
unit also introduces the text, drawbacks and problems of the play.

27.1 Harold Pinter—Introduction

Pinter was the author of 29 plays and 15 dramatic sketches and the co-author of two works for stage
and radio. He was considered to have been one of the most influential modern British dramatists.
Along with the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play for The Homecoming and several other American
awards and award nominations, he and his plays received many awards in the UK and elsewhere
throughout the world. His style has entered the English language as an adjective, Pinteresque,
although Pinter himself disliked the term and found it meaningless. Pinter received over 50 awards,
prizes, and other honours, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 and the French Legion
d’honneur in 2007.

22.1.1 Biography

Birth and the Family
Harold Pinter was born on October 10, 1930, in Hackney, a section of metropolitan London, England.
His father, Hyman, and his mother, Frances Mann, were descended from Sephardic Jews from
Portugal, who had, around 1900, migrated to England after an interim residence in Hungary. The
family, relatively poor, lived very frugally, like the other working-class families in the area.

Education
Pinter was raised in Hackney, east London, and educated at Hackney Downs School (1941 to 1947),
where he began writing poetry and prose. He was a sprinter and a keen cricket player, acting in
school plays and writing poetry.

He took an interest in theater, taking roles as both Macbeth and Romeo in school
productions of Shakespeare.

His education continued in 1948, when he obtained a grant to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic
Art but did not complete the course. Finding the academy oppressive, he only stayed for two terms.
In the same year, he tried to obtain legal status as a conscientious objector, which he was denied,
and he was eventually fined for refusing National Service as a conscientious objector. Subsequently,
he continued training at the Central School of Speech and Drama and worked in repertory theatre
in Ireland and England.

Marriage
In 1956 he married actress Vivien Merchant and had a son, Daniel born in 1958. He left Merchant in
1975 and married author Antonia Fraser in 1980.

308 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY