By Whitney Eggers, Production Dramaturg

In almost all his works, Pinter explores the construction of memory—what’s real and what’s invented (and whether there’s a difference between the two), and how, when gaps in memory inevitably appear, we fill them to our own advantage. Given his preoccupation with the elusive nature of memory, his tenuous grip on his own seems particularly apt.

But if Pinter had trouble holding onto the events of his past, it wasn’t for lack of significance. Born in 1930 to a tailor in the East End of London, Pinter enjoyed a happy childhood until the outbreak of World War II. At nine years old, Pinter numbered among the thousands of children separated from their families in London and evacuated to the English countryside. The evacuation lasted a year—long enough to imprint itself on Pinter’s growing consciousness, but too short to keep him away from the heaviest bombings of the Blitz. The war permeated Pinter’s early adolescence with “a real sense of an extreme and perilous life. […] People really felt their lives could end tomorrow…. [A]t one point we were all evacuated from our house when there was a raid and we opened the door and [our garden] was alight all along the laundry wall.... We were evacuated straight away. Though not before I took my cricket bat.”

Clearly a young man with a macabre sense of the comic, Pinter began acting in high school, eventually joining touring theatrical companies and acting under the stage name David Baron. It was under this name that Pinter met actress Vivien Merchant, his first wife and the originator of almost all his major female roles until their final separation in 1975. While on tour, Pinter began his playwriting career with The Room (1957), a one-act play received warmly by critics, who noted Pinter’s promise. From there, writing seemed to spill out from his pen: The Room set in motion a prolific career during which Pinter wrote 31 plays, 27 screenplays—including film adaptations of his stage works—eight collections of poetry, and a few dozen sketches and prose pieces. Among his plays are masterpieces such as The Birthday Party (1957), The Dumb Waiter (1957), The Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1965), Old Times (1970), Betrayal (1978), and One for the Road (1984). His works garnered numerous awards, including the Tony for Best Play in 1967 (The Homecoming) and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. Three years after receiving the Nobel Prize, Pinter succumbed to esophageal cancer.

Pinter remains one of the most important British playwrights in history, not only for his tremendous output but also for his innovations in stage language and structure. Heavily influenced by Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka, Pinter’s ear for language furnished him with a unique ability to capture everyday speech patterns beyond what’s simply being said. With his characters’ continual cross-talk, non-sequiturs and, of course, pauses, Pinter wrote the way people actually communicate. Through what he described as a “a continual talking about other things, rather than what is at the root of their relationship,” Pinter forged a language riddled with hidden battlegrounds in which a word or a silence can mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Pinter’s approach to character was as revolutionary as his language. Crafting characters whose motivations and identities remain unknowable, Pinter created a kind of stage realism that cuts closer to reality than the traditional parlor room drama that preceded him. In a well-made play, every move, every line plots a demonstrable course in a character’s development. But as Pinter explained in his essay “Writing for the Theatre,” “The world is full of surprises. A door can open at any moment and someone will come in. We’d love to know who it is, we’d love to know exactly what he has on his mind and why he comes in, but how often do we know what someone has on his mind or who this somebody is, and what goes to make him what he is, and what his relationship is
to others?”

In The Homecoming, Pinter demonstrates the ultimate unknowability of anyone—even our own family, and even ourselves. As each person vies for power, ideas like ‘character’ and ‘truth’ become malleable, adapting to whatever gives the greatest advantage. In his Nobel lecture, Pinter said, “When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimeter and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror—for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.” Through his investigation of memory, character, and language, Pinter shattered conventional rules of drama, giving audiences a new structure through which to view ourselves.