The most popular and crucial British playwright, Harold Pinter, the 2005 Nobel Prize literature winner died on Wednesday due to cancer. The playwright was 78 when he left this world, leaving a large number of literature fans behind him. Pinter, who wrote over 30 plays, received high popularity and recognition for his creation of dramatic worlds of menace, despair and psychic helplessness sense. His highly exceptional plays like The Caretaker, The Homecoming and The Birthday Party used only a very few characters in order to offer the audiences with a sense of doubt, ambiguity and mysterious dread.
Plots played a secondary role for Mr. Pinter and the dramas by this playwright hardly reached some clear resolution. Instead, Pinter used to construct an important sense of psychological terror and inner tension from disjointed and hesitant dialogue lines broken by the extended silences. The plays of this playwright included a political message however, in some later years Pinter made views all the more explicit and explanatory. He also used the speech of Nobel acceptance in order to denounce Iraq’s invasion by the U.S. and then to call Tony Blair as a “deluded Idiot”. Mr. Pinter also said of this invasion that how many innocent lives have to be taken in order to qualify as war criminal and mass murderer.
The works of this playwright that bore influence of modernist poet like T.S. Eliot and existentialist dramatist such as Samuel Beckett explored the themes of jealously, loneliness, fear and sexual frustration. The mental or social balance of Pinter’s characters and in a way of the entire society was undercut most of the times by a sardonic and biting humor. Pinter and Fraser got married in the year 1980 and maintained a happy and contented household with six children from her earlier marriage. All of these 6 plus 17 grandchildren together lived with the popular playwright.
