Harold Pinter was born in Hackney, a working-class neighborhood in London's
East End on 10 October 1930.
He is one of the most important dramaturgs of the English theatre.
Pinter started writing plays in 1957.He had mentioned an idea for a play
to a friend who worked in the drama department at Bristol University. The
friend liked the idea so much that he wrote to Pinter asking for the play.
His style and gift for creating tension and horror through the most economic
of means has made him one of the most respected playwrights of our day. His
plays are noted for their use of silence to increase tension, understatement,
and small talk.
“Violence is really only an expression of the question of dominance and subservience,
which is possibly a repeated theme in my plays. I wrote a short story a
long time ago called The Examination, and my ideas of violence carried on
from there. That short story dealt very explicitly the with two people in
one room having a battle of an unspecified nature, in which the question
was one of who was dominant at what point and how they were going to be dominant
and what tools they would use to achieve dominance and how they would try
to undermine the other person's dominance. A threat is constantly there:
it's got to do with this question of being in the uppermost position, or
attempting to be" says Harold Pinter.
This can be seen in one of his first plays,The Dumb Waiter,where “Gus
is a submissive junior hit man who is constantly bossed around by Ben,which
is the senior hit man, the dominant foil to his submissive partner”,says Victoria
Roddam in a review of “The Dumb Waiter & other pieces by Harold
Pinter”.
The main problem in Pinter's plays is "victimisation of the other". We can
formulate the problem the other way around as "man's struggle to avoid victimisation
by the other". Pinter's heroes are not the only characters who face this
problem. Pinter sees man in a continuous struggle of dominance and subservience.
The ones who are able to dominate find a temporary peace on earth just like
their ancestors of the ancient times.( Burkman, Katherine H.. The Dramatic
World of Harold Pinter)
In Betrayal,which was published in 1978,Pinter introduces something new:
there is a confused chronological structure of the play.“In Betrayal, playwright
Harold Pinter works backwards,says Karen Weinstein.The first two scenes are
in the present,but the remaining action goes back in time, from the chilly
breakup in Emma and Jerry’s small London flat.Pinter never reveals his point
of view, but lets the audience draw its own conclusions offering scenes
of the affair alternating with scenes of the two male friends meeting.”
Todd Olson writes in Reviews on Current Productions that Betrayal represents
one of Pinters last producable plays for the stage, having written the body
of what are considered his finest plays before 1972.This play is less
cryptic and more causal than the rest, and, despite telling this story in
reverse order, the first scene taking place in the spring of 1977 and the
last in the winter of 1968, Betrayal is relatively straight-forward and logical.
Another characteristic of Pinters’ plays is the “single room” element that
appeares in most of his plays.We can see it in The Dumb Waiter,The Room,The
Caretaker,The Basement or in Ashes to Ashes,his most recent play.The author
evolutionates but he also keeps a lot of elements that appear in all of his
plays like the “single room”,the victimisation of a character or the broken
relationships between the personages so as the dialogue between them.
"Pinter's
dialogue is as tightly - perhaps more tightly - controlled than verse," Martin
Esslin says in The People Wound (1970).
Larry Campbell writes that his plays often involve situations in
which an outsider or an unkown factor becomes the dominant element.This dominatn
element manages to broke or to infuence the relationships between the actors.
In The Dumb Waiter,published in 1960, two hired killers employed by a mysterious
organization to murder an unknown victim.The play is set in a single room
with no one coming in or getting out of the room.These two persons have no
contact with the outside world,but their life is being influenced by it.
With these elements,Harlod Pinter
became the English playwright who achieved international success as one of
the most complex post-World War II dramatists..He introduces new elements
in his plays as a result of his evolutin as a writer,but he doesn’t consider
leave the ones which appeared in his first works.
This really is an awful business,this fashion.I must tell
you I feel that I’ve been unfashionable all my life.I was oldfashioned from
the very beggining and I’m unfashionable now,reallyHarold Pinter.
Biografía: Betrayal de Harold Pinter
The Dumb Waiter de
Harold Pinter
The Collection de Harold
Pinter
The Room
Ashes to Ashes
The Dramatic World
of Harold Pinter
www.haroldpinter.org
www.brainyencyclopedia.com
www.bbc.co.uk