MILAN – The world of letters today celebrates the birth anniversary of the playwright, theater actor, director, screenwriter and writer Harold Pinter , Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. VITA– Harold Pinter was born in London in 1930. Very young, I publish some poems and start acting in the theater under the stage name of David Baron. He began his career as a character actor. Pinter studied and wrote for the comedy genre: his first work in three acts was ‘The Birthday’. Then followed ‘Il guardiano’ and ‘Il calapranzi’. Above all, I explore the problem of communication, submission to power, isolation and insecurity through different plays. In Pinter’s one-act acts, humor was always of great importance. Harold Pinter and was also a screenwriter of works by other writers. His theater followed the founding lines of Kafka and Beckett, with whom he had the opportunity to forge a friendship Pinter always denies the existence of an ‘omniscient knowledge’ of the work of art beyond what actually appears in the text. In 1977, Harold Pinter’s name was in all the tabloids when, in public, I leave his wife, actress Vivien Merchant, full of problems. His new companion became Antonia Fraser, a Catholic, and a future successful writer of biographies. He was always very socially engaged with Amnesty International and with other humanitarian associations. With the ‘Commedie della memoria’, Pinter’s theater underwent an evolution. In 2005 Harold Pinter received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 2006 he too was awarded the Europe Theater Prize while the following year the French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin awarded him the Legion of Honor.THE WORKS– With The Caretaker, Pinter has his first taste of success. The work centers on two brothers who bring home a homeless man to live with them, a man who then exerts a strange grip on his brothers. The plot, like many of Pinter’s works, conveys “a world of bewildering menace,” and the writer uses “his own vocabulary,” as the critic for The New York Times once explained. The Homecoming (1965), considered by some to be his masterpiece, explores family tensions. In the text, a man takes his wife to meet his father and brothers after a long estrangement. The wife ends up leaving him to stay with his family. The homecoming was then made into a movie. These are the years in which Pinter wrote the scripts for his own works, as well as the works of others. In addition, Il servant (1963) and Gli infortuni (1967), both directed by Joseph Losey. The two work together, perhaps one of the best known film adaptations is that of 1981: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, played by Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep. In 1978 Pinter brought another of his most highly regarded works to the stage, the play Betrayal. This tale of infidelity and marital crisis seemed to reflect the writer’s life in a way, particularly his relationship with Joan Blakewell. His interest in politics becomes more explicit in his later works. The short work The language of the mountains (1988), for example, was written to highlight the mistreatment of the Kurdish people in Turkey. He and his fellow playwright Arthur Miller had visited Turkey together a few years earlier.
