By Nora Sørena Casey

Harold Pinter’s plays often lead us into the unknown-blending comedy, terror, sound, and silence to explore (but never define) human existence. Yet the uncertainty in these works is not a product of the playwright’s confusion. Across the years, Pinter earned a formidable reputation for the strength of his convictions, and his fierce, restless spirit shaped all aspects of his life: “I don’t think Harold would accept anything, except the laws of cricket, without question,” said his second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser. His relentless inquiry and brazen attitude made Pinter a theatrical maverick.

Born in east London on October 10, 1930, Pinter was an only child with a large extended Jewish family. Ordinary boyhood pursuits like reading and playing sports were disrupted by the events of World War II: he was evacuated out of London on several occasions, and also lived there through some of the heaviest bombings of the blitz. Although Pinter was not religious, more personal conflict intermittently marked his life whenever he met with anti-Semitism, ranging from street fights as a boy, to bar fights as a young man, to heated arguments later in life. The support of a close-knit group of male friends also shaped his adolescence, and their youthful arguments and activities included Pinter’s first foray into theatre. Teenage performances as Romeo and Macbeth, lauded in the school and local newspaper, inspired Pinter to turn to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art when his Latin wasn’t up to par for prestigious universities.

Pinter spent 1948 at the Royal Academy and hated it—by the end of the year he tended to skip class and drift through the streets of London reading, writing poetry, and watching cricket, and he did not return after the second term. That same year, at age 18, he was called up for military service. “I was aware of the suffering and of the horror of war, and by no means was I going to keep it going,” Pinter recalled. “I said no.” With no religious or moral affiliation to justify his claim as a conscientious objector, he was arrested and fined multiple times before the government changed its policy. While Pinter remained adamant in his rejection of military and educational institutions, he had yet to find a place in society where he belonged. His interest in writing poetry resulted in a few publications in 1950, but he failed to gain much traction as a poet. Pinter also aspired to act for the BBC, but his unsolicited inquiries got little response, and he spent several years primarily dirt poor and jobless. “I always have an image of Harold striding down the street in his navy-blue coat with a rage against the world,” recalled an old girlfriend of that time. “But it was also a rage for life, a rage to do something, a rage to achieve something.”

That something was on its way in 1951, when Pinter joined the classical acting legend Anew McMaster’s theatre company and set off on a tour of Ireland, beginning his career in the theatre in earnest. He spent most of his 20s acting with different repertory companies, taking on larger roles as he received the training he had failed to get at the Royal Academy. His acting career remained low-profile but steady; Pinter’s personal life picked up steam in 1956 when he met the actress Vivien Merchant during a production of Jane Eyre (she as Jane and he as Rochester) and after the end of their season together, the two were married.

Pinter formed another pivotal relationship during those tours—not face to face, but within the pages of a book. He picked up Murphy, the debut novel of Samuel Beckett, in an Irish library. Beckett’s style transformed the theatrical landscape in 1953 with Waiting for Godot and deeply influenced Pinter, as did Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, and Kafka. After years of quietly writing poetry, Pinter made his playwriting debut in 1957 with a one-act called The Room, in which the presence of all these authors could be felt. Yet even in that initial work Pinter’s distinct voice shone through: “The play makes one stir uneasily in one’s shoes and doubt, for a moment, the comforting solidarity of the earth,” wrote one reviewer. The distinct style of The Room received positive, if limited, attention, and the next year Pinter was approached by a young producer for another play.

He delivered The Birthday Party, and its London premiere in 1957 is the stuff of theatre legend—people hated it. Pinter’s style of dialogue catalyzed much of the uproar, with its interweaving of banalities, repetitions, pauses, and non-sequiturs, as in this early exchange:

MEG: What time did you go out this morning, Petey?

PETEY: Same time as usual.

MEG: Was it dark?

PETEY: No, it was light.

MEG: But sometimes you go out in the morning and it’s dark.

PETEY: That’s in the winter.

MEG: Oh, in winter.

Today, audiences might recognize the humor and elegance of such dialogue, which seems absurd, ordinary, and poetic all at once. But at the time it was greeted by a flurry of walk-outs and negative reviews, with one notable exception. Harold Hobson’s write up in the Sunday Times (published the day after the play closed) heralded a different reception of this cryptic work. Hobson celebrated its originality and humor, and he trumpeted the universal resonance of the story, in which two ominous men appear to confront Meg and Petey’s innocuous tenant. “There is something in your past—it does not matter what—that will catch up to you,” wrote Hobson. “One day there is the possibility that two men will appear. They will be looking for you and you cannot get away. And someone will be looking for them too. There is terror everywhere.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that audiences were not as quick as Hobson to embrace Pinter’s unique style, later dubbed the “comedy of menace.” After all, The Birthday Party challenged how communication worked on the stage. As playwright Tom Stoppard said:

One thing plays [before Pinter] had in common: you were supposed to believe what people said up there. If somebody comes in and says, ‘Tea or coffee?’ and the answer is ‘Tea,’ you are entitled to assume that somebody is offered a choice of two drinks, and the second person has stated a preference. With Mr. Pinter there are alternatives, such as the man preferred coffee but the other person wished him to have tea, or that he preferred the stuff you make from coffee beans under the impression that it was called tea.

By dismantling the conventions of dialogue, Pinter broke open the dramatic possibilities of language on stage. A bold conviction not to cater to audiences or to anyone else enabled him to push drama into this new terrain. He faced challenges each step of the way, yet forced others to look for answers from his work, not from the playwright, and to reconcile themselves to a scarcity of facts. “I remember asking Pinter about my character. Where does he come from? Where is he going to?” recalls actor Alan Ayckbourn. “And Harold just said, ‘Mind your own fucking business. Concentrate on what’s there.’” In spite of his uncompromised belief in his work, the commercial failure of The Birthday Party was rough on the Pinters, especially as they were tight on money and now had a young son. In the following years, Pinter was working as an actor and radio and television writer, as well as writing for the stage: the short play A Slight Ache was commissioned and broadcast on the radio by the BBC in 1958, and his one-act The Dumb Waiter made its debut in Germany in 1959.

The 1959 premiere of his next full-length play, The Caretaker, signaled a change in the winds of fortune. “The Caretaker, on the face of it, is everything I hate most in the theatre—squalor, repetition, lack of action, etc.—but somehow it seizes hold of you,” said the playwright Noël Coward, speaking for many. “Nothing happens except that somehow it does.” The elliptical meanings, pauses, and strong sense of foreboding that had been censured in The Birthday Party were greeted this time with national accolades. Pinter describes the major difference in his approach to this latest play with his typical sardonic attitude: “I cut out the dashes and used dots instead.” As the subsequent celebration of The Birthday Party suggests, it was not the work that had changed but rather the audience, who were now receptive to the dramatic undercurrent of hostility (so epitomized by the playwright that it birthed the term “Pinteresque”) mixed with terse dialogue, absurd moments, and biting humor.

His career was cemented in 1964 with The Homecoming, but Pinter continued to explore new terrain, both in his writing and in his role in the theatre. Plays written in his late 30s, such as Landscape and Silence, abandoned the brash sexuality of The Homecoming to explore isolation and memory. Even as Pinter’s thematic scope broadened, he once remarked that all of his plays were about “the weasel under the cocktail cabinet,” and No Man’s Land is no different. It is as darkly funny as it is a biting commentary about the distance between where we may have meant to go in our lives and where we find ourselves now. Early in the play, Spooner’s admonition that he speaks to Hirst “with this startling candor” not only demonstrates the character’s ticklish verbosity, but also Pinter’s ability to both undermine and sympathize at a line. The dry crackle of his wit punctuates the slower burn of loneliness and loss and might-have-beens.

Those years also saw Pinter’s introduction to the cinema after years of writing for radio and television. From 1963 onward, Pinter wrote over 20 films, including many adaptations that captured the essence of such lauded novels as The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Handmaid’s Tale in crisp images for the screen. This ability to embrace a variety of writers’ works also manifested itself in his numerous directing credits, ranging from James Joyce’s Exiles to Coward’s Blithe Spirit to his own work, and Pinter served as the associate director of the National Theatre from 1973 to 1983. This was also a time of great change in his personal life: he and Vivien were divorced, and in 1980 he married Lady Antonia Fraser.

Pinter’s political beliefs soon began to pull him into the limelight. Later plays such as One for the Road in 1984 and Mountain Language in 1988 interwove a distinctly political element into his trademark style, an element that was made explicit in his public identity. “I understand you’re interested in me as a playwright. But I’m more interested in myself as a citizen,” Pinter said in an interview in 1988. “We still say we live in free countries, but we damn well better be able to speak freely. And it’s our responsibility to say precisely what we think.” He exercised this right often—for example, when visiting Istanbul in 1985 with Arthur Miller to protest human rights abuses or when fostering dialogues with leading writers about Margaret Thatcher’s government. Pinter was also a vehement critic of the United States’ foreign policy, which he found deeply destructive and hypocritical, and which he attacked vigorously in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.

After a long battle with cancer, Pinter died in 2008 at age 78. His love of writing, his passion for the theatre, his abhorrence of war, and even his commitment to cricket (he ultimately managed a club) were all unfaltering. Yet if the road looks straight, it is not because it was an easy path to follow, but because Pinter refused to swerve. He remained unapologetic in the face of criticism, with a determination that was guided by genius and aided by stubbornness.

Pinter was a drama school dropout, a conscientious objector, an innovative writer, a precise director, a strident political activist, a contentious celebrity, and ultimately one of the cornerstone voices of the theatre. Yet when we watch one of his plays, these labels can drop away, allowing each of us to have our own response to the unique sensibility—dark, uncertain, and evocative—which remains his strongest legacy. Beneath his distinct stylistic voice lies a universal yearning to understand human relationships and the world they create. It’s a world that, as Pinter saw it, is not a safe or comforting place, and his belief echoes the uncertainty, fear, and loneliness we sometimes encounter in our own lives. When confronting such a bleak portrait of reality, it can be tempting to look away, but it’s safe to say that’s not what Harold Pinter would do.