Harold Pinter: Theater's angry old man

At the Prize of Europe, the playwright is all politics

By Porter Anderson
CNN
Friday, March 17, 2006 Posted: 1824 GMT (0224 HKT)

[...] Harold Pinter -- one of a handful of English-language writers whose work has powerfully affected two generations of European and North American theater -- was onstage Sunday in the ornate 300-year-old Teatro Carignano to receive the 10th Premio Europa per il Teatro, or Prize of Europe in Theater.

[...] But if anyone thought this London-born son of a dressmaker would rhapsodize on the career that began in 1948 with his arrival at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, they were surprised.

The task of Europe, he told the assembly, "is to resist the power of the United States" -- a political and cultural force so virulent, Pinter said, that it may "destroy" Europe. [...]

And in "Art, Truth & Politics," a lecture Pinter created for his receipt of the Nobel, the man's terms finally were clear and harrowing, both for the United States and for his own British government.

The United States, Pinter wrote in that lecture, is "brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless." It "no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favor. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain."

"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?" he asked in his text. "One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice." [...]

Despite such bleak visions, Pinter's determination embraces hope: "There does seem to me to be more public awareness now," he says, "... of what actions our societies and our countries actually take and have taken. And what it means. And what torture actually is."

And in the winter of his illustrious career, the playwright likes to talk of his characters having lives of their own. "They surprise me."

The role he has assigned to himself, the artist-adamant, may at times surprise him, too. But he wryly insists he's earned his stance as the angry old man of modern theater.

"I've written 29 damned plays," he cracks. "Isn't that enough?"