Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Harold Pinter
-
Standard Name: Pinter, Harold
Used Form:
Pseudonym: David Baron
Pseudonym: Harold Pinta
Best-known as one of the leading British playwrights of the later twentieth century and as a Nobel Prize winner, HP
was also a poet, actor, theatre director, and writer of radio plays and screenplays both original and adapted. He was early recognised for stage violence, for comedy of menace and theatre of the absurd. His work became more urgently political with time. He stripped the excess fat from theatre dialogue, and mapped out his own distinctive theatrical topography: a place haunted by the ambivalence of memory, flecked by uncertainty, reeking of sex, and echoing with a strange, mordant laughter.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
This opportunity arose from her guest editing an issue of Cambridge Opinion while the regular editors were sitting exams, in an issue she called The Writer out of Society. She had discovered Allen Ginsburg...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Jane Howard
She took four years to write this novel, working with a new agent, A. D. Peters
. Having before this written fast and easily, she now reduced her speed to a crawl, with constant rewriting...
Reception
Sarah Kane
A propos the Sheffield production of 2015, Alan Bennett
commented on the difficulty of achieving realism with such extreme violence: how can a character mutilated on stage be shown as having attention for anything at...
Performance of text
Shelagh Delaney
Nottingham Playhouse
, celebrating fifty years in its current home, put on The Lost Plays Revue, a composite work built around forgotten short sketches by SD
(Then and Now) and by others including Harold Pinter
.
Thorpe, Vanessa. “Lost short plays by Pinter and Delaney to be staged again”. The Observer, p. 25.
Performance of text
James Joyce
This followed its rejection by managements in England, Ireland and America, the first pronounced by George Bernard Shaw
and the second by W. B. Yeats
.
O’Brien, Edna. “The ogre of betrayal”. The Guardian, pp. Review 10 - 11.
11
The first English-language production took place in New...
Literary responses
Judith Kazantzis
Harold Pinter
called this work beautifully wrought, concrete, and passionate, and also noted that a major political poem was a rare event. Carol Ann Duffy
(herself an intensely political poet) observed sardonically: Someone should...
Literary responses
Winsome Pinnock
WP
was touched and delighted when members of the National Theatre
audience (mostly white and relatively affluent) saw the likeness between their own parents and those on stage.
Stephenson, Heidi, and Natasha Langridge. Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwriting. Methuen Drama.
In 1991 this play won her the...
Literary responses
Samuel Beckett
Dylan Thomas
called this novel Freud
ian blarney: Sodom and Begorrah.
Parker, Peter, editor. The Reader’s Companion to Twentieth-Century Writers. Fourth Estate and Helicon.
59
Iris Murdoch
recorded the lasting impression which it made on her when she first read it.
Federman, Raymond, and John Fletcher. Samuel Beckett. University of California Press.
21
Harold Pinter
—who while trying to...
Literary responses
Antonia Fraser
AF
was not happy when Harold Pinter
found the manuscript, at a relatively early stage, confusing.
Fraser, Antonia. Must You Go?. Random House of Canada.
286
Literary responses
Ann Quin
Berg earned AQ
two major awards: the Harkness Fellowship, given to the most promising Commonwealth artist under thirty years, and the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship from the University of New Mexico
.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
AF
's debut as a crime novelist was complicated by reviewers looking for parallels with her own life, particularly her recent, high-profile relationship with Harold Pinter
. The Sunday Times was really nasty, but...
Literary responses
Antonia Fraser
Pinter
loved this spoof, which brought together characters from his various plays.
Fraser, Antonia. Must You Go?. Random House of Canada.
67-8
Literary responses
Shelagh Delaney
The race issue received astonishingly little attention from reviewers, probably because SD
was so far ahead of her time in acknowledging its existence. However, Colin MacInnes
(himself homosexual and author of the novel City of...
Leisure and Society
Clemence Dane
In her last years, CD
greatly admired the film West Side Story (1961), and went to see Harold Pinter
's The Caretaker (1960) over and over again.
Jeffrey John Archer, Earl Amherst,. Wandering Abroad: the Autobiography of Jeffrey Amherst. Secker and Warburg.