Harold Pinter, that dedicated chronicler of human frailty and outright cruelty, has left us not unexpectedly at the age of seventy-eight. He had been battling cancer for the better part of this decade, and, in 2006, had delivered an appropriately unsettling farewell via Samuel Beckett's one-act play, "Krapp's Last Tape", at the Royal Court's Theater Upstairs.
This final triumph came one year after Pinter received the Nobel Prize in Literature for "[uncovering] the precipice under everyday prattle and [forcing] entry into oppression's closed rooms." It was a well-deserved honor for a man who forever altered the craft of dramatic writing in the late '50s and early '60s with terse, precisely worded works like THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, THE HOMECOMING and THE CARETAKER. His career raged unabated through the next two decades, peaking in 1978 with the first production of BETRAYAL, a massively influential play in which the history of an extramarital affair is told in reverse (it is impossible to imagine a nonlinear masterpiece like MEMENTO without it).
In the coming days, I hope to write more extensively on the life of Harold Pinter and what his work meant to me. Until then, I urge you to read the New York Times' obit (co-authored by the late Mel Gussow), and to track down the filmed adaptation of THE HOMECOMING starring Ian Holm, Paul Rogers and Terence Rigby. I'd also direct you to the brilliant 1983 adaptation of BETRAYAL featuring Ben Kingsley, Jeremy Irons and Patricia Hodge, but it is unconscionably out of print.
And so it is here that Harold Pinter ends this reel.
