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Mel Gussow: Who’s Harold Pinter? Harold Pinter: He is not me. He’s someone else’s creation. —Mel Gussow1 Pinteresque: Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of the British playwright Harold Pinter or his works. Marked especially by halting dialogue, uncertainty of identity, and air of menace. —Oxford English Dictionary He was Pinter from the beginning. As a nameless dramatist once said: I feel sorry for Harold. Other people can choose between comedy and tragedy, Pinter always has to write a Pinter play. —Peter Hall on Pinter at 702 One of the many awards bestowed on Harold Pinter was for his play Betrayal , which won the 1979 Play of the Year award from the Society of West End Theatre. At the ceremony the playwright began his acceptance speech by saying, “I am very surprised. No more, I suppose, than Michael Billington .”3 The audience, startled at first, laughed. Michael Billington—a great advocate of the dramatist and eventually his biographer—had written a harsh review of Betrayal in 1978. Pinter’s barb on such a public occasion was no accident. He has maintained throughout his career direct and indirect dialogue with the critics of his work. Of all the forces that mediate between a playwright and the public, theatre reviewers may be of cardinal importance. Along with journalists and interviewers, they act as external mediators—employing channels such as television, radio, and print media to form, cultivate, and modify a playwright’s image as dramatist. Theatre reviewers, who present the first critical judgment on individual productions of a dramatist’s plays, constitute a major factor in shaping the perception of that playwright’s HaroldPinter 4 Who Controls the Playwright’s Image? 162 harold pinter dramatic style and lay the groundwork for the critical assessments that follow, including academic studies, which further influence the position of the playwright in cultural or historical memory. The reviewers’ mediation of Harold Pinter’s plays through the different stages of his career present an intriguing phenomenon. Pinter’s early plays, unlike those of John Osborne and John Arden, were not associated with a particular theatre company or director. Although several directors and producers helped promote Pinter—for example, Michael Codron , who produced Pinter’s first play in London—the theatre reviewers constituted the most significant force in mediating the dramatist’s early plays, an influence they tried to maintain as Pinter grew more secure in the theatrical field, even to the point of downplaying the canonical standing he would acquire later. The very terrain of Pinter criticism is a contested subject in research circles devoted to the playwright, exemplified by two scholarly works that deal with Pinter’s critical reception: Austin Quigley’s 1975 study The Pinter Problem, in which the diversity and, for Quigley, the unsatisfactory nature of critical attempts to elucidate the enigmatic effect of Pinter’s plays serve as a point of departure; and Susan Hollis Merritt’s Pinter in Play: Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter (1990), which maps the critical approaches to Pinter’s work from a reader-response perspective. Pinter is well known for his own pronouncements regarding his theatrical practice, as in: “I’d say that what goes on in my plays is realistic, but what I’m doing is not realism,”4 or, “I suggest there can be no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.”5 While seeming to collaborate in providing a key to his plays, such statements themselves comprise contradictions and therefore elicit questions rather than supply answers. Although such statements convey Pinter’s critique of, and objection to, the tendencies of critical discourse to classify and categorize, Pinter critics and scholars have co-opted them to confirm one or another interpretation of his dramatic work or commentary on it. Such statements both exemplify Pinter’s pronounced views on his work during the early stage of his career and reflect the interactions he established with critics of his plays. Typically, in the first stage of such an interaction, Pinter responded to criticism about his work in an interview or a talk. This response elicited a chain of further critical interpretations that were subsequently incorporated into the critical discourse.6 To this harold pinter 163 extent, Pinter’s career demonstrates an ongoing bi-directional interaction between a playwright and...

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