Pinter Unable to Travel to Sweden for Nobel Prize Ceremony

By: Nov. 24, 2005
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Citing reasons of health, Nobel Prize-winner Harold Pinter will not travel to Stockholm, Sweden to collect the award on December 10th.

The playwright, who was this year's winner of the immensely prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature, will send publisher Stephen Page in his place. Pinter has been recuperating from cancer of the oesophagus. Despite his physical absence at the ceremony, a live broadcast of Pinter's lecture to the Swedish Academy will be shown.

In addition to the award presentation, a starry reading of his Celebration will be performed to honor both the achievement and the playwright's 75th birthday; it will feature Sinead Cusack, Janie Dee, Michael Gambon, Jeremy Irons, Stephen Rea, Charles Dance and Penelope Wilton, and will be directed by Alan Stanford. The reading will be presented for three nights at London's Albery Theatre by the Gate Theatre Dublin--from December 1st through 3rd.

The 75 year-old British playwright, who has been one of the preeminent dramatists of the last fifty years, first found acclaim with 1960's The Caretaker; it was preceded by the less-successful The Birthday Party (which was better-received in a new production a few years later). Those plays set the template for a style that would become uniquely associated with Pinter. Influenced by Samuel Beckett (who would later become a friend), Pinter's plays have been called "comedies of menace," with situations, often unfolding in a single room, revealing hidden layers of danger, malice and absurdity. Other Pinter plays include The Homecoming, Old Times, No Man's Land, Betrayal, Mountain Language, Moonlight and Celebration.

Pinter recently announced that he would hang up his playwriting hat to focus on writing poetry and on political activism (he fervently opposes the war against Iraq). Pinter is also known for his work as a director and actor in addition to his renown as a playwright. As a screenwriter, he penned the scripts of The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant's Woman and a never-filmed version of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, among others. The Caretaker, The Homecoming, The Birthday Party and Betrayal have all been made into films.

Pinter joins Dario Fo, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O'Neill, Luigi Pirandello and George Bernard Shaw in the list of playwrights who have won the Nobel Prize; he is the first British playwright to have done so.


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