Word: pinter
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...forgotten, their own limitations are the principal cause, but they have been given a forceful, added shove toward oblivion by the work of a new writer whose themes are quieter and deeper. Already hailed in London as one of the major playwrights of the decade, 31-year-old Harold Pinter has come to Manhattan with The Caretaker (TIME, Oct. 13), the biggest serious hit of the new season...
...Most of Pinter's plays, mainly one-acters, have dealt with small, desperate souls in small, unkempt rooms, tuning in on them with cruel precision, but making no attempt to particularize or resolve their dilemmas. Three years ago, his first full-length play, The Birthday Party, was greeted by a chorus of derision from London critics and ran for only a week before audiences averaging 20 people. But Pinter's drab and isolated rooms, surrounded by the menace of the unknown and the uncontrollable, gradually seemed less obscure. The Birthday Party was revived with great success...
...Pinter owes much of his success to his sense of theatrical immediacy, acquired during twelve years as an actor. Darkly handsome, with black curly hair and threatening eyebrows, he was born in the grimy East End of London, the only child of a Jewish tailor. He was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School, where he admired an eccentric master with a wild passion for the theater who liked to throw inkwells out the window and strode the halls shouting lines from Othello...
Thus inspired, Pinter enrolled in 1948 at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but found it "a poof's paradise-well, that's a bit unfair, but there was a terrible atmosphere of affectation and unreality, ankle bands and golden hair." Later he got a job as an actor, played with various repertory companies, and married Actress Vivien Merchant (they have...
...enormous lorry driver. He had his cap on and he hardly said a word. And all the while, as he talked, the little man was feeding the big man-cutting his bread, buttering it, and so on. Well, this image would never leave me." From it, Pinter wrote his first play, The Room. But he didn't give up acting entirely. Last year he played for five months in The Caretaker in London...