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
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...
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...
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...
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...
Harold Pinter
adapted this novel for television in 1989, bringing out its subtlety as a study of the corrosive effect of fascism on human relationships.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Pinter
Textual Production
Dodie Smith
DS
found herself increasingly out of step with the new drama being produced in London since the advent of the Angry Young Men. She could tolerate John Osborne
and even admired Shelagh Delaney
...
Textual Production
Caryl Churchill
The play was commissioned by Michael Codron
, an influencial theatre producer who had backed Harold Pinter
and Joe Orton
.
Kritzer, Amelia Howe. The Plays of Caryl Churchill: Theatre of Empowerment. Macmillan.
61
The production marks the beginning of CC
's long association with the Royal Court
Textual Production
Antonia Fraser
AF
supplied introductions for The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England, April 1975 (by various hands), the Trollope Society
's edition of Anthony Trollope
's Framley Parsonage, 1996, and the Folio Society
Textual Production
Sarah Waters
By perverse coincidence, SW
began her novel about the bombing of London (whose title had been used by several other writers already) on the morning of 11 September 2001.
Allardice, Lisa. “Uncharted Waters”. The Guardian.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
She broke new ground here in...
Textual Production
Fay Weldon
FW
joined distinguished writers such as Harold Pinter
in contributing to the multi-act Mixed Doubles: an Entertainment on Marriage, which was published in 1970 by Methuen
.
Halio, Jay L., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 14. Gale Research.
14: 752
Newman, Jenny. “’See Me as Sisyphus, But Having A Good Time’: The Fiction of Fay Weldon”. Contemporary British Women Writers: Texts and Strategies, edited by Robert E. Hosmer, Macmillan.
