Harold Pinter’s Politics: A Silence Beyond Echo by Charles Grimes examines the expression of Pinter’s political beliefs across every aspect and era of his artistic career.

The fierce political stances of Harold Pinter have been embodied in plays, screenplays, and in his career as a theatrical director. Pinter’s name is now a byword for antiauthoritarian and anti-American politics, and his artistic embrace of these stances can be seen from the earliest phases of his writing. His uniqueness as a political artist is that he is pessimistic about changing his audience or making it see its complicity in the horrors of the modern world. These horrors are dramatized through images of torture and oppression culminating in moments of silence that index the fill extent of the destruction unleashed by power against dissidence.

Harold Pinter’s Politics by Charles Grimes, assistant professor of English and Theater at Saint Leo University, examines Pinter’s politics. Chapter 1 describes how Pinter diverges from previous political playwrights such as Shaw and Brecht by refusing to seek moral or intellectual conversion in an audience complicit in established oppression. Chapter 2 shows how Pinter’s early plays, set in a dramatic world of uncertainty and mystery, condemn authoritarian organizations that demand conformity at the price of death. The Dumb Waiter is a world organized on observation, discipline, and punishment, central characteristics of social modernity according to Foucault. The Birthday Party evokes historical facts such as the emergence of torture as a tool of religious repression in medieval Europe and the Nazi tortures of Jews. The Hothouse even more explicitly protests against a world in which ruthless power co-opts and destroys opposition to render itself increasingly invulnerable.

Chapters 3 and 4 in Harold Pinter’s Politics investigate Pinter’s recent openly political plays, including the two latest, Celebration and Press Conference. In these plays, power, intimately connected with language use, contempt for social others, and misogyny, ruthlessly asserts itself by destroying dissidence, triumphing in the enforced silence of so-called enemies of the status quo. Stylistically in these minimalist plays, comedy and depth of character are consciously rejected, and Pinter’s trademark ‘menace’ is stripped of psychological peculiarity, becoming social generality. Pinter’s repressive regimes tie social exclusion to political violence, utilizing a dynamic, not unknown in our current political climate, of delegitimizing oppositional ideas. In addition to a literary study of these texts, Grimes illumines their creative qualities by describing performances of the plays and by analyzing Pinter’s working drafts and notes from the British Library. Pinter’s politics emerge in aspects of his career other than his playwrighting. His adaptations of Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers and Joseph Conrad’s Victory connect oppression to moral and intellectual certitude as they dramatize the sacrificial costs of political opposition. Chapter 6 of Harold Pinter’s Politics examines Pinter’s career as a theater director, as it expresses his concern with the historical consequences of fascism, and his principled anti-Americanism in regard to U.S. military actions in Kosovo and the Middle East.

Pinter’s political theater finds its culmination in Ashes to Ashes, a meditation on the vanishing possibility of a moral and empathetic politics in our post-Holocaust world. The play embodies the struggle between dissident conscience, which adopts the strategy of narrative projection into iconic stories of twentieth-century atrocity, and a complacent status quo, ending in silence evoking the specter not only of a world past any political redemption but of a rigid separation between history, memory, and conscience.

Harold Pinter’s Politics is the finest study I’ve seen of Pinter’s passionate but complicated place within the tradition of contemporary political theater. Grimes’s book is insightful in its readings, balanced in its assessments, and rich of historical, literary, and theatrical backgrounds. Working closely with authorial drafts and other archival material, the author explores the shifting emphases of Pinter’s political plays throughout his career and while composing individual plays. At the same time, it provides a persuasive account of the recurrent occupations that link such early plays as The Birthday Party and The Dumbwaiter with One or the Road, Ashes to Ashes, and Pinter’s explicitly political plays of the 1980s and 1990s. A particular virtue of this book is Grimes’s attention to Pinter’s work as a screenwriter, director, and actor. By including Pinter’s life and career as a whole, he is able to discuss Pinter’s often controversial public statements in the context of his work as an artist. Harold Pinter’s Politics will help shape the debate on Pinter’s political dramaturgy for years to come.

Harold Pinter’s Politics will appeal to students of the performing arts, as well as those at the arts’ intersection with political activism and its history.