RECOGNITION FOR PINTER’S WORLD – SLIPPERY AND VERY, VERY ENGLISH
By Dalya Alberge

The Times, UK
Oct 14 2005

Highest honour for the man who made silence an art form

Harold Pinter outside his London home yesterday (KIERAN
DOHERTY/REUTERS)

HE HAS been showered with awards and is revered worldwide, but Harold
Pinter, one of Britain’s greatest playwrights, received the ultimate
accolade yesterday – the $1.3 million (£743,000) Nobel Prize for
Literature.

At the age of 75, he is following in the footsteps of Saul Bellow,
Samuel Beckett and George Bernard Shaw, among winners of the world’s
most prestigious literary honour.

Pinter, who broke the mould of British theatre in the 1960s, turned
silence into an artform with brooding dramas.

His classics for screen and stage, including The Caretaker, The
Homecoming and The Servant, have stood the test of time, influencing
a generation of British dramatists and introduced a new word to the
English language, Pinteresque, to convey an atmospheric silence.

This month the Swedish Academy decision to give the Nobel Peace Prize
to Mohamed ElBaradei was seen as a slap in the face for the US.

Now it has awarded the Literature Prize to a radical and unrelenting
critic of America and its war in Iraq and of the Government of
Tony Blair. Pinter, who has never been afraid to speak his mind on
the political stage, has denounced the Prime Minister as “a hired
Christian thug” and President Bush as a “mass murderer”.

Pinter said yesterday that he was “overwhelmed” and, speaking to
reporters outside his London home, took the opportunity to attack
the Government over the Iraq war. “I have written 29 plays and I
think that’s really enough,” he said after a champagne celebration
with his wife Lady Antonia Fraser at their home. “I think the world
has had enough of my plays. I shall certainly be writing more poetry
and I’ll certainly remain deeply engaged in the question of political
structures in this world.” The writer has been recovering from cancer
of the oesophagus.

Leaning on a cane outside and sporting a bandaged head after a fall,
he continued: “I think the world is going down the drain if we’re
not very careful,” he said. “Iraq is just a symbol of the attitude
of Western democracies to the rest of the world.” He also hinted that
he would use the 45-minute acceptance speech to attack the war in Iraq.

“I intend to say whatever it is I think. I may well address the state
of the world.”

The academy said that it had singled out Pinter, “who, in his plays,
uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into
oppression’s closed rooms”.

Once again, the academy has opened the debate on the political nature
of a prize for literature. This year’s announcement was delayed
for a week after the 15 active academy members were reported to
have disagreed over whether to anoint Orhan Pamuk, the Turk who has
campaigned for recognition that Turkey committed genocide against
the Armenians after the First World War. A prize for him would have
angered Turkey, it was feared.

Part of the problem lies with the prize founder himself. Alfred Nobel,
who died in 1896, decreed in his will that the literature prize should
go to “the person who shall have produced . . . the most outstanding
work in an ideal direction”, a phrase that has confounded everyone
since.

News of Pinter’s win sent a flurry of excitement through the British
publishing and theatre worlds, if not Downing Street or the White
House. There was also a sense of relief that they knew his work. Year
after year, there has been a Pinteresque pause from publishers before
they ask, “Who?”, and confess to never having heard of the winner.

Some of Britain’s leading playwrights were among those leading the
applause yesterday.

The Oscar-winning writer Sir Tom Stoppard said: “With his earliest
work he stood alone in British theatre up against the bewilderment
and incomprehension of critics, the audience and writers, too.”

Sir David Hare, whose dramas include Stuff Happens, about the Iraq
war, said the academy had made a brilliant choice: “Not only has
Pinter written some of the outstanding plays of his time, he has
also blown fresh air into the musty attic of conventional English
literature by insisting that everything he does has a public and
political dimension.”

Pinter also follows in the footsteps of Sir V. S. Naipaul who, in
2001, became the first British author to win the prize since William
Golding in 1983.

Born the son of a Jewish tailor in East London in 1930, Pinter was a
rebel from an early age, declaring himself a conscientious objector
and refusing to do national service. He began his acting career in
provincial theatres. The Caretaker established him as a commercial
and critical success, making him one of Britain’s foremost dramatists.

LOUD APPLAUSE

“He had incredible tenacity as a director, expressed perhaps best
through his profound irritation at the old Royal Court’s squeaky
chairs, which blighted many a performance.”

Stephen Daldry, former artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre

“He’s very pedantic, famously so. Words don’t get changed, lines
don’t get changed. He really believes in the text.”

James Fox, who starred in Pinter’s classic, The Servant

“My two favourites are Landscape and Silence. I just thought, and
still do, they are the most beautiful poetic dramas, full of the pain
of lost memory.”

Ian Brown, artistic director of West Yorkshire Playhouse

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress