Nobel Prize Winning Playwright Harold Pinter Dead

An actor, essayist, screenwriter, poet and director as well as a dramatist, Harold Pinter died last Wednesday of cancer. In more than 30 plays,includingThe Birthday Party,The Caretaker,The Homecoming and Betrayal, Pinter captured the anxiety and ambiguity of life. The adjective Pinteresque has become part of the cultural vocabulary as a byword for strong and unspecified menace. Pinter was outspoken in his views on repression and censorship, at home and abroad. He used his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to critize American foreign policy, stating that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq, but that it had also “supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship” in the last 50 years. He once said “The play is a comedy because the whole state of affairs is absurd and inglorious. It is, however, as you know, a very serious piece of work.”