Playwright Harold Pinter wins Nobel Prize

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

In honoring British playwright Harold Pinter today, Nobel Prize judges have again chosen an artist of literary achievement and political contention.

The 75-year-old Pinter, the most influential British playwright of his generation, is also an unrelenting critic of the U.S. involvement in Iraq, and of the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"I think the world is going down the drain if we're not very careful," a frail but defiant Pinter, who has been treated for throat cancer in recent years, said to reporters outside his London home.

And

He published poetry under the name "Harold Pinta" and emerged as a playwright with The Birthday Party (1957), in which the intruders Goldberg and McCann enter the retreat of Stanley, a young man who is hiding from childhood guilt and who tells them, "You stink of sin, you contaminate womankind."

The play established Pinter's dark, distinctive style that relished the juxtaposition of brutality and the banal and could stop hearts with the conversational pause. His characters' internal fears and longings, their guilt and unruly sexual drives, are set against the neat lives they have constructed to survive, a grim game in which actions often contradict words.

Influenced by Samuel Beckett, Pinter once said of language, "The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place."

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Pinter is programmed into all incoming theater majors at colleges throughout the nation. He's that important, and, unlike Beckett who gets just too darned weird for my tastes, Pinter is much more accessible and understandable. His trademark pauses and silences, mandated as stage directions in all his scripts, are like steak and chocolate cake and lobster and caviar for any actor who's serious about his craft. Furthermore, Pinter deals with the human dimension of a world made insane by cultural oppression, the political realm, and the nexus between them. Coupling his plays with his political essays, Pinter is clearly a prime example of what I have asserted to be real art.

This is most excellent, indeed!

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