About Harold Pinter

Born in London in 1930, Harold Pinter was one of the most influential, provocative and poetic dramatists of his generation. Inspired in part by Samuel Beckett, he created his own distinctive style, marked by terse dialogue and meaningful pauses. His plays are particularly famous for their use of understatement to convey characters’ thoughts and feelings. In 2005, Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The eccentric behavior and dialogue in Pinter’s plays are frequently very funny, and audiences laugh hard and long, yet there is an underlying feeling of danger in his plays, and critics frequently describe them as “comedies of menace.” We, the audience, have the same need for verification that the characters have, and Pinter artfully makes us experience their uneasiness. His plays are funny, but agitating.