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Unit 27: Harold Pinter— Introduction to the Author and the Text

In 1985 Pinter stated that whereas his earlier plays presented metaphors for power and powerlessness, Notes
the later ones present literal realities of power and its abuse. Pinter’s political theater dramatizes
the interplay and conflict of the opposing poles of involvement and disengagement. Mountain
Language (1988) is about the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language. The dramatic sketch The
New World Order (1991) provides what Robert Cushman, writing in The Independent described as
10 nerve wracking minutes of two men threatening to torture a third man who is blindfolded, gagged
and bound in a chair; Pinter directed the British première at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs,
where it opened on 9 July 1991, and the production then transferred to Washington, DC, where it
was revived in 1994. Pinter’s longer political satire Party Time (1991) premiered at the Almeida
Theatre in London, in a double-bill with Mountain Language. Pinter adapted it as a screenplay for
television in 1992, directing that production, first broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 on
17 November 1992.
Intertwining political and personal concerns, his next full-length plays, Moonlight (1993) and Ashes
to Ashes (1996) are set in domestic households and focus on dying and death; in their personal
conversations in Ashes to Ashes, Devlin and Rebecca allude to unspecified atrocities relating to the
Holocaust. After experiencing the deaths of first his mother (1992) and then his father (1997), again
merging the personal and the political, Pinter wrote the poems Death (1997) and The
Disappeared (1998).

Pinter’s last stage play, Celebration (2000), is a social satire set in an opulent restaurant,
which lampoons The Ivy, a fashionable venue in London’s West End theatre district, and its
patrons who have just come from performances of either the ballet or the opera. Not that they
can remember a darn thing about what they saw, including the titles.
During 2000–2001, there were also simultaneous productions of Remembrance of Things Past, Pinter’s
stage adaptation of his unpublished Proust Screenplay, written in collaboration with and directed
by Di Trevis, at the Royal National Theatre, and a revival of The Caretaker directed by Patrick Marber
and starring Michael Gambon, Rupert Graves, and Douglas Hodge, at the Comedy Theatre.
Like Celebration, Pinter’s penultimate sketch, Press Conference (2002), invokes both torture and the
fragile, circumscribed existence of dissent. In its première in the National Theatre’s two-part
production of Sketches, despite undergoing chemotherapy at the time, Pinter played the ruthless
Minister willing to murder little children for the benefit of The State.

27.1.3 Screenwriter

Pinter composed 27 screenplays and film scripts for cinema and television, many of which were
filmed, or adapted as stage plays. His fame as a screenwriter began with his three screenplays
written for films directed by Joseph Losey, leading to their close friendship: The Servant (1963),
based on the novel by Robin Maugham; Accident (1967), adapted from the novel by Nicholas Mosley;
and The Go-Between (1970), based on the novel by L. P. Hartley. Films based on Pinter’s adaptations
of his own stage plays are: The Caretaker (1963), directed by Clive Donner; The Birthday Party (1968),
directed by William Friedkin; The Homecoming (1973), directed by Peter Hall; and Betrayal (1983),
directed by David Jones.
Pinter also adapted other writers’ novels to screenplays, including The Pumpkin Eater (1964), based
on the novel by Penelope Mortimer, directed by Jack Clayton; The Quiller Memorandum (1966), from
the 1965 spy novel The Berlin Memorandum, by Elleston Trevor, directed by Michael Anderson; The
Last Tycoon (1976), from the unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, directed by Elia Kazan; The
French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), from the novel by John Fowles, directed by Karel Reisz; Turtle
Diary (1985), based on the novel by Russell Hoban; The Heat of the Day (1988), a television film, from

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