Page 320 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

British Drama

Notes State whether the following statements are true or false:
11. Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party was the playwright’s first commercially-produced, full-
length play.
12. The Birthday Party when opened on May 19 at the Lyric Opera House in Hammersmith, it
met with harsh reviews and closed down within a week.

27.3 Summary

• Harold Pinter was born on October 10, 1930, in Hackney, a section of metropolitan London,
England.
• Pinter was raised in Hackney, east London, and educated at Hackney Downs School (1941 to
1947). 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.
• 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.
• Pinter died from liver cancer on 24 December 2008.
• Pinter’s career as a playwright began with a production of The Room in 1957. His second play,
The Birthday Party, closed after eight performances, but was enthusiastically reviewed by critic
Harold Hobson.
• Pinter’s first play, The Room, written and first performed in 1957, was a student production at
the University of Bristol, directed by his good friend, actor Henry Woolf, who also originated
the role of Mr. After Pinter mentioned that he had an idea for a play, Woolf asked him to write
it so that he could direct it to fulfill a requirement for his postgraduate work.
• Pinter wrote The Hothouse in 1958, which he shelved for over 20 years. Next he wrote The
Dumb Waiter (1959), which premiered in Germany and was then produced in a double bill
with The Room at the Hampstead Theatre Club, in London, in 1960.
• The first production of The Caretaker, at the Arts Theatre Club, in London, in 1960, established
Pinter’s theatrical reputation. The play transferred to the Duchess Theatre in May 1960 and
ran for 444 performances, receiving an Evening Standard Award for best play of 1960.
• During 1964–1967, Pinter also wrote the radio play A Slight Ache, first broadcast on the BBC
Third Programme in 1959 and then adapted to the stage and performed at the Arts Theatre
Club in 1961. A Night Out (1960) was broadcast to a large audience on Associated British
Corporation’s television show Armchair Theatre, after being transmitted on BBC Radio 3,
also in 1960.
• Working as both a screenwriter and as a playwright, Pinter composed a script called The
Compartment (1966), for a trilogy of films to be contributed by Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco,
and Pinter, of which only Beckett’s film, entitled Film, was actually produced.
• Following a three-year period of creative drought in the early 1980s after his marriage to
Antonia Fraser and the death of Vivien Merchant, Pinter’s plays tended to become shorter
and more overtly political, serving as critiques of oppression, torture, and other abuses of
human rights, linked by the apparent invulnerability of power.
• 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.
• Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party was the playwright’s first commercially-produced, full-
length play.

314 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY