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/.
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
Textual Production
Antonia Fraser
She and Pinter
decided to sell their manuscripts to the British Library
. In July 1994 they went to pay our manuscripts a visit. They found that while Pinter's were stored in conventional box-files, hers...
Family and Intimate relationships
Antonia Fraser
AF
first really met the high-profile dramatist Harold Pinter
, at a dinner party after which they spent the whole night together, talking.
Fraser, Antonia. Must You Go?. Random House of Canada.
5
Family and Intimate relationships
Antonia Fraser
Having decided to live with the dramatist Harold Pinter
, AF
found herself about to be cited in a divorce action by his wife, Vivien Merchant
.
Wroe, Nicholas. “The history woman”. The Guardian, pp. 16-19.
18
Family and Intimate relationships
Antonia Fraser
AF
made her second marriage, to Harold Pinter
, leading British playwright, with whom she had been living for about five years.
Fraser, Antonia. Must You Go?. Random House of Canada.
122
Wroe, Nicholas. “The history woman”. The Guardian, pp. 16-19.
16
Travel
Antonia Fraser
AF
and Harold Pinter
spent two weeks in Israel which took in the thirtieth anniversary of its founding as the State of Israel.
On 3 December her friends and family held a Frances Horovitz Memorial Celebration at the Young Vic Theatre. Harold Pinter
, Anne Stevenson
, Roger Garfitt
, Michael Horovitz
, and others read, sang, and performed her poetry.
Horovitz, Michael, and Frances Horovitz. A Celebration of and for Frances Horovitz (1938-1983). New Departures.
2
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...
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...
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...
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...