The Birthday Party | Author Biography

Harold Pinter was born on October 10, 1930, in Hackney, a section of metropolitan London, England. His father, Hyman, and his mother, Frances Mann, were descended from Sephardic Jews from Portugal, who had, around 1900, migrated to England after an interim residence in Hungary. The family, relatively poor, lived very frugally, like the other working-class families in the area.

Between 1941 and 1947, Pinter attended the Hackney Downs Grammar School, where he began writing poetry and prose. He also took an interest in theater, taking roles as both Macbeth and Romeo in school productions of Shakespeare. His education continued in 1948, when he obtained a grant to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but, finding the academy oppressive, he only stayed for two terms. In the same year, he tried to obtain legal status as a conscientious objector, which he was denied, and he was eventually fined when he refused to answer an army draft call.

In 1949, while he continued to write non-dramatic works as Harold Pinta, he launched a career as professional actor. His first work was as a bit actor for the British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) Home Service radio, from which, in 1951, he moved up to a role in Shakespeare's Henry VIII, a production of BBC's Third Programme. He also resumed formal training at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Thereafter, under the stage name David Baron, he acted with Shakespearean and other repertory companies in both England and Ireland. On tour, he met and worked with the actress Vivien Merchant, whom he married on September 14, 1956. The pair struggled to make ends meet, and Pinter was forced to assume a variety of odd jobs, including stints as a dance-hall bouncer or "chucker,'' a dishwasher, a caretaker, and a salesman.

Pinter's first foray into play writing came in 1957, when a friend asked him to write a piece for production at Bristol University. The result was The Room, a one-act play that earned the favorable notice of critic Harold Hobson and revealed Pinter's unique talent and technique. The work was not professionally produced until after The Birthday Party opened and floundered in 1958, but it was Hobson's review of The Room's university production that brought Pinter to the attention of the young, new-wave producer Michael Codron, who decided to stage The Birthday Party.

Pinter's first major staged success was The Caretaker, which, in 1960, began a run in London's West End and won the playwright The Evening Standard Award. Along with The Birthday Party and The Homecoming (1965), The Caretaker established Pinter's reputation as a major absurdist playwright, and, in the opinion of some commentators, his claim to being Britain's most important dramatist since George Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara).

In the 1960s, Pinter proved his diversity by producing a steady stream of both stage and media works. He began an extended association with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962 with The Collection at the Aldwych Theatre, but by then he had also begun writing for cinema, adapting The Caretaker to film. Although his creative energy remained unabated, he devoted more and more of it to scripting plays for television and the screen. Some of these were originally written for the stage, but most were first written for specific media. Some, like The Pumpkin Eater (1964) and The Quiller Memorandum (1966), were adaptations from the fiction of other writers. Acclaim for his media works quickly rivaled that awarded his stage works and greatly expanded his creative involvement and focus.

Although some believe that Pinter's best theatrical works were his earliest pieces in the absurdist mode, the playwright has remained a major voice in the British theater since the early-1960s. If financial success and the diffusion of his creative energy have diminished his stage power, as some have claimed, there has been no real erosion in his reputation as England's premier, post-World War II playwright, his only serious rivals being John Osborne (Look Back in Anger) and Tom Stoppard (Arcadia). Nevertheless, despite some well-received plays like One for the Road (1984) and Mountain Language (1988), the playwright has met with some decline in his critical fortunes. It is has almost become a scholarly truism that none of Pinter's works written for the stage after the 1960s has superceded The Caretaker, The Homecoming, or The Birthday Party as Pinter's major contributions to modern theater.