Pinter’s self-vandalising

Let’s think about it. How did Harold Pinter write his masterpieces? And why are they praised so much more lavishly than the scribbles of his contemporaries?

Let’s think about it. How did Harold Pinter write his masterpieces? And why are they praised so much more lavishly than the scribbles of his contemporaries? Moonlight, his 1993 play, has been slickly revived at the Donmar and it opens with a dying pensioner sprawling luxuriously in a double-bed and ranting at his wife. Across stage his sons engage in madcap vaudevillian banter. Other characters wander in and speak fluent nonsense. A girl, who is also a ghost, articulates charming drivel about moonshine and memory. The characters fail to communicate and the dramatist fails to communicate why they fail to communicate. Typical Pinter.

He adopted this uneasy, audience-intolerant method because he reached his creative maturity in the mid-20th century when literature had generated a shadow industry, academia, which was more powerful and prosperous than the art it elucidated.