Harold Pinter: Playwright, Actor, Poet
“So often, below the word spoken, is the thing known and unspoken.” — Harold Pinter, 1962
Onstage at Lantern Theater Company January 10 through February 17, 2019, Betrayal is one of Harold Pinter’s many masterpieces. The British playwright is one of the 20th century’s literary giants, joining the rarefied ranks of writers like Shakespeare, Dickens, and Orwell by having his name turned into an adjective: Pinteresque plays are suffused with silence and — often, but not always — a sense of menace.
Pinter was born in 1930 in East London to working class parents. He came of age during World War II, and the bombings of London left him with lifelong memories of seeing his backyard in flames and persistent feelings of loneliness and dread. When he was nine, he was evacuated to Cornwall — without his parents — to live safely away from the Blitz. He later recalled his parents visiting him, and after they said their goodbyes and separated, they ran back to each other across the grounds of his adopted home; the separation was traumatic and the reunion short-lived. This experience marked him for life, and the feelings of isolation, uncertainty, and menace it engendered characterized some of his most potent plays.
Pinter did not set out to be a playwright. From adolescence he aspired to be a poet. When he became concerned about supporting himself, he turned to an equally unstable career: acting. He spent some time at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts before faking a nervous breakdown to get out of the program, instead honing his craft by performing Shakespeare and popular comedies with touring companies and regional theaters. It was in a 1953 production that he met Vivien Merchant, his fellow actor and future wife.
One of Pinter’s lifelong friends was largely responsible for unleashing his dramatic potential. The theatrical society at the school where his friend was pursuing graduate studies was looking for short plays, and turned to Pinter. In just four days and nights, Pinter turned out his first play: The Room. The play attracted positive press, and Pinter’s new career as a playwright was born. No matter how successful he became, though, he always looked to his hero for guidance: Samuel Beckett, to whom Pinter sent drafts of every play.
Pinter’s career can be divided into roughly three phases: the early comedies of menace, the memory plays of his middle career, and his later political plays. The comedies of menace most closely demonstrate what is “Pinteresque” about Pinter: the long and pregnant pauses, a reliance on subtext rather than explanation, dialogue that is at once incredibly naturalistic and subtly virtuosic, and a pressing sense of menace or doom. Classics like The Birthday Party (a flop when it was first produced, but later a revered entry in the canon) and The Homecoming are funny, dense, and deeply unsettling.
Pinter’s middle period is characterized by explorations of memory and love. Betrayal comes from this middle period, casting its eye backwards across a long affair and the ways in which we betray others — and ourselves. Betrayal has a uniquely personal resonance among Pinter’s work: it is based on his seven-year love affair with television presenter Joan Bakewell. The other plays in this period deal with the unreliability of memory: how we change memories to make them what we need. By the end of this period of work, Pinter’s marriage to Vivien Merchant was ending, largely due to another affair: Pinter had fallen in love with Lady Antonia Fraser, a respected biographer, novelist, and historian.
This affair ultimately turned into a longer and happier marriage than his first, and ushered in a third period of his career. These final, political plays are inspired by both Pinter’s instinctual dislike of war and of Lady Antonia’s fervent political opinions. He was twice called before a tribunal in his youth for being a conscientious objector, but it wasn’t until his relationship with Fraser that his beliefs explicitly turned up onstage. This political work also became increasingly public offstage; he used his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature to blast U.S. foreign policy.
Throughout all three periods, Pinter worked in several facets of the theater. He continued to act, often in his own plays and always to great acclaim. He also directed, (again) often his own work, and (again) to success. This intimate knowledge of directing and acting informed his playwriting, which in turn informed his acting and directing. Often called an “actor’s playwright,” he knew precisely how to help actors deliver his text. Once, after watching a rehearsal of a play, he adjusted an actor’s treatment of one of the famous pauses by saying “I wrote ‘dot dot dot,’ and you’re giving me ‘dot dot.’”
Pinter also continued to write poetry, even after he stopped writing plays. In 2012, four years after his death, Antonia Fraser told The Guardian that her favorite of them was “It Is Here,” a poem he wrote for her fifteen years after their relationship began:
What sound was that?
I turn away, into the shaking room.What was that sound that came in on the dark?
What is this maze of light it leaves us in?
What is this stance we take,
To turn away and then turn back?
What did we hear?
It was the breath we took when we first met.
Listen. It is here.
Throughout his long and celebrated career, Pinter created a distinct and unique theatrical voice. His lasting influence on the theater is less in overt style and more in construction: with his subtext-heavy plays and opaque plotting, he freed writers from the need for exposition or explanation. To watch a Pinter play is sometimes like eavesdropping; his characters are possessed of knowledge we do not have, and thoughts and feelings we can not access. With his work, he gave later writers permission to let go of an audience’s hand and to trust them to follow the play where it will go.
Betrayal is onstage at the Lantern January 10 through February 17, 2019. Visit our website for tickets and information.
