Amazon.com
London theater critic Michael Billington draws on interviews with the noted British dramatist, his friends, and coworkers to explore the links between Harold Pinter's life and works like The Birthday Party and Betrayal. He discovers a good deal of autobiography, as well as political commentary on the power struggle implicit in male-female relations. The account of Pinter's youth in London's East End and his close friendships with other smart, iconoclastic Jewish boys is especially good. Intelligent and accessible, this is a fine theater biography for the general reader.
From Booklist
Billington's exhaustive critical biography of one of Britain's major modern playwrights is long on literary analysis and shorter on biography. Billington discusses nearly all Pinter's major plays at length, from his earliest forays (e.g., The Room, The Dwarfs) to the famous Birthday Party and The Homecoming and beyond. The book's most fascinating sections explore the sources, literary and biographical, of Pinter's evocative, cryptic plays. Billington's analysis relies heavily on the hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) political messages in Pinter's work, and they are there, although if the plays were only complaints against authoritarian regimes, they would be a lot less interesting. As hinted above, Billington's portrait of Pinter feels incomplete, especially appearing, as it does, side by side with his fine literary scholarship. You can't help wondering how much more Billington might have turned up about the man if Pinter were not still a living force to be reckoned with in the English-speaking theater. Jack Helbig
