Nobel-winning playwright Harold Pinter dies

From Times Online
December 25, 2008

(The Times)
Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2005

Patrick Foster, Media Correspondent
Harold Pinter, universally acclaimed as one of the greatest British playwrights of his generation, has died.

The Nobel Prize winner lost his battle with cancer yesterday, his agent confirmed. He was 78.

Pinter, who also enjoyed success as a screenwriter for film and television, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, being hailed by the awarding committee as "the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century".

However he was too frail to travel to the ceremony, having been diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus in 2002. source

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From The Sunday Times
December 28, 2008
Harold Pinter: in the shadow of a giant
Harold Pinter peered into society’s darkest corners and his plays not only reflected what he found there but reshaped the wider world

Dominic Dromgoole
Harold Pinter casts a long shadow. Over poetry, over politics, over the theatre, over the texture of the world we live in. He was a giant in an age that lacks them. Through a titanic effort of will he managed to retain his stature and his authority for almost 50 years.

Theatre is a cruel business. It loves to inflate reputations and careers, just as it loves to throw up make-believe worlds from wood and canvas and paint. They sit there for a while looking stable and secure and somehow real. Then they are dismantled with a violent speed, which shames their careful construction, before being chucked in the skip. There is no shortage of heralded and hyped artists whose bubble reputations have burst with the same brutality. Coward, Rattigan, Orton, all dipped in and out of fashion. For Pinter to have retained his Olympian standing for so long is not the least of his achievements.

He used to visit the Bush theatre regularly. One evening he came into the pub beneath the theatre with all his usual prickly charisma crackling around him. A force field of restrained aggression always seemed to tighten the air around him. It was an aura prepared for arenas of competitive status such as the Ivy restaurant, or a theatre first night, or a party of the Great and the Good. But the Bush pub was full of its usual motley of feral junkies, plainclothes coppers and festive Jamaican grandads, and none of them paid him the slightest attention.

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