Harold Pinter (Writers & Their Work) (Volume 212)

Harold Pinter made his dramatic début in 1958 with The Birthday Party, a piece which was received with almost total incomprehension by critics and public alike. But time has shown that this reaction was due to the unfamiliarity of his dramatic style, rather than to inherent obscurities in his work, and The Caretaker, produced two years later, quickly earned the cinema, the radio and television: during the past decade he has established himself as the most consistently successful serious dramatist of his generation.

This study traces the development of Pinter's writing from the so-called comedy of menace exemplified by The Birthday Party in which the mood alternates between the jocular and the terrifying, with the humour matching the horror, to the later pieces such as The Homecoming (1965) and Old Times (1971), which explore the questions of personal identity and of the verification of experience – how do we reconcile the inconsistencies between the present and the past, or how much of what a character says of himself are we to believe? The problem of communication is another central theme in Pinter's work, although this often turns out to be a matter of refusal rather than of inability: as Pinter has remarked himself, ‘Communication is too alarming ... to disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility’. Finally the author pays a special tribute to the excellence of Pinter's dialogue and the compactness of his writing. This, he finds, is not only a matter of the accuracy of Pinter's ear in reproducing the vocabulary and rhythms of contemporary speech, but of his power to arouse and control the sensibilities of his audience, working through what is not said, as much as through what is.

John Russell Taylor has been film critic of The Times, and writes on the theatre, films and television for a number of journals; he is now teaching in the University of Southern California. His books include The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play (1967), Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear (1969) and Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama (1962).