Playwright, poet, screenwriter and political activist Harold Pinter He died last Wednesday 24 at the age of 78, a victim of cancer, according to his wife Antonia Fraser. to the Guardian newspaper. Pinter wrote poetry, movie scripts, radio scripts, prose fiction, and even he played an actor, but he owes his fame above all to the plays he signed, among which The Room (1957) The Birthday Party (1957) The Homecoming (1964) o Betrayal (1978) are perhaps some of the best known.
Throughout his career, Harold Pinter received Numerous awards. The nomination as Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1966, the Laurence Olivier award in 1996, the Fiesole Prize ai Master of Cinema in 2001 and a long etcetera. One of the most prominent was the Nobel, in 2005. He could not pick it up due to his precarious state of health, but he did not miss the opportunity to make his voice heard from such a prestigious rostrum. In his acceptance speech, that recorded In video, given the impossibility of making an appearance, he began by speaking of the truth in dramatic art (in relation to the genesis of new creations) to end up establishing a link with the political plane - «As a citizen I have to ask: What is truth? What is a lie? ”- something that leads him to make a frontal condemnation of the Iraq war and a harsh criticism of the governments headed by George Bush and Tony Blair.
He titled the essay with an eloquent Art, Truth & Politics (Art, Truth and Politics) making clear three vocations of essential importance for its author: that of creator, that of rigor and that of political activism. The best example, a work that synthesizes how these three aspirations converge in Pinter: in 2003, he published a compendium of anti-war poems, entitled War (War), coinciding with the turbulence that heralded the war in Iraq and with the first effective manifestations of violence.
The award of perhaps the world's most prestigious literature prize, the Nobel, came four years after he was diagnosed with the disease Pinter has been battling for his last seven years. Cancer did not stop him, and in fact between 2001 and 2008 his production is considerable. In the words of the theater critic Marcos Ordóñez, “the doctors made a mistake in 2001, when they diagnosed him with end-stage esophageal cancer. From then until his death he developed a superhuman activity, as a writer, stage director, screenwriter (…), political activist (determined to achieve the conviction of Tony Blair as a war criminal) and also an actor. "
It is often said of his work that it can be framed in the so-called theater of the absurd. There are those who are quick to highlight the characteristics that link them to the angry youth, the group of British intellectuals who in the mid-twentieth century wanted to express, through their creations in different fields of culture, the disappointment that society caused them in the one they had to live. Others, like Ordóñez himself, prefer to simply say that "his theater is an extreme concentrate of reality" and deny labels such as absurd o symbolic. What almost everyone agrees on is highlighting Pinter as one of the most important playwrights of the second half of the XNUMXth century; without a doubt, he is one of the most awarded.
In the statement that Antonia Fraser sent to the British newspaper The Guardian, Harold Pinter's second wife declared that it had been "a privilege to live with him for 33 years" and was convinced that "he will never be forgotten." Probably, many of your readers or viewers have had the same conviction when they heard the news.
References
- Goodbye to the look of a rebel
- Art, Truth & Politics
- The most irate among the 'irate youths'
- British playwright and Nobel Prize winner for literature Harold Pinter dies of cancer
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- Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics
- Harold Pinter Biography
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