Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2009
Summary
Putting together a collection of essays about a living writer carries a special sense of excitement, even danger. Harold Pinter, at the age of seventy, is still extremely active, and prominent, as a playwright, as the double bill of The Room, his first play, and Celebration, his latest, at the Almeida Theatre in spring 2000, demonstrated: he also directed both plays. His acting career continues, for example with his role of Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park. Later in the year, Remembrance of Things Past, a stage version of The Proust Screenplay, was produced at the Royal National Theatre. Meanwhile, there is a steady stream of productions of earlier plays, written over a period of more than forty years, both in English and in translation, which ensures a continuing refreshment and reappraisal of the whole range of Pinter's work. Pinter the dramatist is protean: his writing moulds itself apparently effortlessly to the forms of radio and television, as well as to the stage, and several plays have been successful in all three media. Major plays - major, in terms of length - have been successfully adapted for film, and Pinter has had an additional career as an outstanding screenwriter, perhaps most notably in conjunction with Joseph Losey. He was a poet before he became a playwright, and has written a novel and a substantial number of essays. His career as a professional actor began in 1951, and as a director in 1959. The problem he poses is both where to begin, and where to end. Pinter is, by purely statistical reckoning, one of the most widely performed and best-known dramatists in the contemporary world. He has also become an academic subject. There is an active Pinter Society in the United States, producing an annual Pinter Record.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter , pp. 1 - 4Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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