Harold Pinter Wins Nobel Prize in Literature
Harold Pinter was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature today, and this apparently came as even more of a surprise to the 75-year-old Pinter than to anyone else. Interviewed at his London home soon after learning of the citation, he said that he was “speechless.” This wasn’t an entirely uncharacteristic reaction from someone whose many plays, revue sketches, and prose works were marked by such spare language that, not too long after the theater world was astonished by his early ’60s pieces, the adjective “Pinteresque” began to be bandied about.
Born in Hackney, a now-gentrifying but still hardly posh London neighborhood, Pinter presumably collects his $1.7 million prize for works including his screenplays for The French Lieutenant’s Woman and In Search of Lost Time as well as his plays. In recognizing an author who was prolific in his first years but much less so over the past couple of decades, the Stockholm committee was, of course, thinking of such comedy-dramas as The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, Old Times, No Man’s Land, Betrayal, Moonlight, and Celebration.
The official announcement summarized Pinter’s work by stating, in part, “Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles.” The statement also noted that Pinter is an author “who, in his plays, uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” (The last word is operative, since The Room was the play with which Pinter introduced himself in 1957. It and Celebration, his most recent work — which, he maintains, is also his last — are to be presented by the Atlantic Theater Company this season, with performances beginning November 16.)
Although Pinter may have been at a loss for words when reporters descended upon him in the wake of his Nobel win, there’s no doubt that he’ll find a number of imposing ones to use when the time comes to accept the prize. He has found them before — not only in plays dotted with numerous stages directions that read “Pause” and “Silence” but also when responding to his activist urges. Over the past few years, for instance, he’s been openly critical of current U.S. policies. Among British critics of the current administration, Pinter may be the most anti-American; some observers may even wonder if his political views were a factor in his receipt of the Nobel prize, given that this year’s peace prize to Mohamed ElBaradei was interpreted as a definite comment on U.S. attitudes toward nuclear proliferation.
A hint of what the playwright (and sometime director and actor) will say in Stockholm may be contained in the speech he gave upon being handed the German Shakespeare Prize in 1970. He recalled once responding to someone who asked what his plays are about by declaring, “the weasel under the cabinet.” Taking the 1970 occasion to acknowledge the remark as meaning “precisely nothing,” he went on to say, “I can sum up none of my plays. I can describe none of them, except to say: That is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.”
The Nobel nod comes as the capper to a big week for Pinter. Dublin’s Gate Theatre, which has staged many of his plays over the years, is feting him on the occasion of his birthday (October 10). The company’s latest production of Betrayal opens tomorrow night (Friday, 14) and, last weekend, such noted Pinter players as Jeremy Irons, Sinéad Cusack, and Michael Gambon appeared in readings from the now-Nobeled dramas.
Although Pinter’s canon is astonishing, it isn’t seminal; his work owes its laconic strains and its observations of inconsolable humanity under unsolvable duress to Samuel Beckett, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. Perhaps Pinter, who has been unwell in recent years and often relies on a walking stick, will keep in mind Beckett’s words “I can’t go on. I must go on” and will be encouraged by his own Nobel win to continue writing plays.
