tagged w/ Harold Pinter
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"A new literary prize set up in honour of Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter has been launched.
The judging panel will include Pinter's widow Lady Antonia Fraser, playwright Sir Tom Stoppard and the broadcaster Mark Lawson.
"I am delighted to support this prize in Harold's name," Lady Antonia said.
The PEN/Pinter prize will be presented at the British Library on 14 October, with the British or UK-based writer receiving a cheque for £1000.
Their work must fulfil the vision for writing that Pinter set out in his 2005 Nobel acceptance speech - turning an "unflinching, unswerving" gaze upon the world, and showing a "fierce intellectual determination ... to define the real truth of our lives and our societies".
Artistic director of the National Theatre Nicholas Hytner and Lisa Appignanesi, president of English PEN, will also help judge the winner.
Lady Antonia said: "I am delighted to support this prize in Harold's name, which celebrates his long association with English PEN and recognises the courage of writers, both in this country and overseas, who, like him, have made a principled stand for writers' freedoms."
Pinter died on Christmas Eve in 2008, he had been suffering from cancer.
He wrote more than 30 plays including The Caretaker and The Birthday Party. His film scripts include The French Lieutenant's Woman
English PEN is part of a worldwide writers' association and charity which works to promote literature and freedom of expression.""A new literary prize set up in honour of Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold... more
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"Art that bewilders one generation becomes accessible to the next; or so it would seem. Widely reviled on its first appearance in 1955, Beckett's Waiting For Godot now packs out the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, which is usually associated with dressy revivals of Wilde and Coward. Pinter's No Man's Land, once regarded as unfathomable, recently had a profitable West End run. Picasso and Rothko are established gallery favourites. And, although Britten's Peter Grimes is now seen as England's national opera, in 1945 it was viewed by many as a "difficult" piece. So how does one explain the transformation in popular taste?
Partly, it's a natural process: the true artist is always ahead of the game and the public takes time to catch up. Beckett in Godot saw life as a matter of stoical endurance in the face of ultimate meaninglessness: not such a far-fetched concept in our own post-Christian, post-ideological age. Above all, Beckett discovered drama could be fashioned not out of external events but out of the process of waiting itself: an idea capitalised on by a host of later writers including Stoppard, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and Mamet in American Buffalo. Pinter's vision of private life as a political power battle in which memories, whether true or false, are a vital tactical weapon, is also one that most of us would now recognise.
But there is more to it than the depth-charge effect of great drama. Along with the erosion of the old certainties and the belief that life is explicable in religious or philosophical terms has gone a total revolution in the form of drama. Plays used to follow an Aristotelian pattern: exposition, crisis, denouement. Now "theatre" is an all-embracing term that includes street spectacles and art installations, and drama can take whatever form the artist chooses. It can be an elliptical fragment like Caryl Churchill's This Is A Chair or a visual epic like Nick Stafford's War Horse. It can be a conversation piece like Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner or a publicly performed essay such as David Hare's Via Dolorosa.
The real sea-change in audiences, however, is that they actively seem to welcome drama that is "open" rather than "closed": work, in other words, that avoids an easy resolution. You could argue this is not wholly new: Ibsen's A Doll's House leaves us free to speculate on Nora's future, just as Chekhov's Three Sisters does not exactly settle its heroines' fate. But, outside the world of genre fiction and movies, today's readers and audiences crave freedom of choice: of being able to make up their own minds about the characters' destiny or the work's ultimate significance. Part of the pleasure of a Pinter play, as the critic Alastair Macaulay once shrewdly wrote, is of not fully understanding it: you only had to listen to the animated conversations on the way out of No Man's Land to grasp how much audiences relished the prospect of working it out for themselves.""Art that bewilders one generation becomes accessible to the next; or so it would... more
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With the new year approaching, this piece takes note of some of the lives that ended during the past 12 months. It presents photographs of a number of legendary writers, actors, artists and musicians. In addition, the piece includes a wonderful photo-gallery, which is accompanied by music audio.With the new year approaching, this piece takes note of some of the lives that ended... more
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Harold Pinter passed away on Christmas Eve at age 78. Pinter is known for his plays, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.Harold Pinter passed away on Christmas Eve at age 78. Pinter is known for his plays,... more
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