The last and longest pause
Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter died on Christmas eve. From the obituary at the Huffington Post:
Harold Pinter, praised as the most influential British playwright of his generation and a longtime voice of political protest, has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 78.
. . . “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 Nobel Academy said when it announced Pinter’s award. “With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution.”
The Nobel Prize gave Pinter a global platform which he seized enthusiastically to denounce U.S. President George W. Bush and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
“The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law,” Pinter said in his Nobel lecture, which he recorded rather than traveling to Stockholm.
“How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?” he asked, in a hoarse voice.
. . . During the late 1980s, his work became more overtly political; he said he had a responsibility to pursue his role as “a citizen of the world in which I live, (and) insist upon taking responsibility.”
Pinter began his stage career as an actor, taking to playwriting in frustration at the inept dialogue he was forced to recite. The photo above shows him in his final role, playing the title character in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape in London in October 2006. (Pinter’s declining health limited him to a wheelchair for much of the performance.)
RIP.
Tags: Harold Pinter, obituaries, theatre