Editing Harold Pinter (section)

====Overtly political plays and sketches (1980–2000)====
Following a three-year period of creative drought in the early 1980s after his marriage to Antonia Fraser and the death of Vivien Merchant,<ref>Billington, ''Harold Pinter'' 258.</ref> Pinter's plays tended to become shorter and more overtly political, serving as critiques of [[oppression]], [[torture]], and other abuses of human rights,<ref name=MerrittPIPGrimes>Merritt, ''Pinter in Play'' xi–xv and 170–209; Grimes 19.</ref> linked by the apparent "invulnerability of power."<ref>Grimes 119.</ref>  Just before this hiatus, in 1979, Pinter re-discovered his manuscript of ''[[The Hothouse]]'', which he had written in 1958 but had set aside; he revised it and then directed its first production himself at [[Hampstead Theatre]] in London, in 1980.<ref name=HHNote>{{cite web |url=http://www.haroldpinter.org/plays/plays_hothouse.shtml |title=The Hothouse – Premiere |first=Benedict |last=Nightingale |work=Originally published in the [[New Statesman]], archived at haroldpinter.org |year=2001 |access-date=27 June 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110613220750/http://www.haroldpinter.org/plays/plays_hothouse.shtml |archive-date=13 June 2011 |url-status=dead}}</ref> Like his plays of the 1980s, ''The Hothouse'' concerns authoritarianism and the abuses of power politics, but it is also a comedy, like his earlier [[Comedy of menace|comedies of menace]].  Pinter played the major role of Roote in a 1995 revival at the [[Minerva Theatre, Chichester]].<ref name=MerrittGrimesHH>Merritt, "Pinter Playing Pinter" (''passim''); and Grimes 16, 36–38, 61–71.</ref>

Pinter's brief dramatic sketch ''Precisely'' (1983) is a duologue between two bureaucrats exploring the absurd power politics of mutual nuclear annihilation and [[Deterrence theory|deterrence]].  His first overtly political one-act play is ''[[One for the Road (Harold Pinter play)|One for the Road]]'' (1984).  In 1985 Pinter stated that whereas his earlier plays presented metaphors for power and powerlessness, the later ones present literal realities of power and its abuse.<ref>Hern 8–9, 16–17, and 21.</ref> Pinter's "political theatre dramatizes the interplay and conflict of the opposing poles of involvement and disengagement."<ref>Hern 19.</ref>  ''[[Mountain Language]]'' (1988) is about the Turkish suppression of the [[Kurdish language]].<ref name=BillingtonGussow/>  The dramatic sketch ''The New World Order'' (1991) provides what Robert Cushman, writing in ''[[The Independent]]'' described as "10 nerve-wracking minutes" of two men threatening to torture a third man who is blindfolded, gagged and bound in a chair; Pinter directed the British première at the [[Royal Court Theatre|Royal Court Theatre Upstairs]], where it opened on 9 July 1991, and the production then transferred to Washington, D.C., where it was revived in 1994.<ref name=NWO>{{cite web |url=http://www.haroldpinter.org/plays/plays_newworldorder.shtml |title=Ten Nerve Racking Minutes of Pinter |first=Robert |last=Cushman |work=[[Independent on Sunday]], archived at haroldpinter.org |date=21 July 1991 |access-date=27 June 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110614003407/http://www.haroldpinter.org/plays/plays_newworldorder.shtml |archive-date=14 June 2011 |url-status=dead}}</ref>  Pinter's longer [[political satire]] ''Party Time'' (1991) premièred at the [[Almeida Theatre]] in London, in a double-bill with ''Mountain Language''.  Pinter adapted it as a screenplay for television in 1992, directing that production, first broadcast in the UK on [[Channel 4]] on 17 November 1992.<ref name=PT>Grimes 101–28 and 139–43; {{cite web |url=http://www.haroldpinter.org/plays/plays_partytime.shtml |title=Plays |editor=Batty, Mark |work=haroldpinter.org |year=2011 |access-date=3 July 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110614004649/http://www.haroldpinter.org/plays/plays_partytime.shtml |archive-date=14 June 2011 |url-status=dead}}</ref>

Intertwining political and personal concerns, his next full-length plays, ''[[Moonlight (play)|Moonlight]]'' (1993) and ''[[Ashes to Ashes (play)|Ashes to Ashes]]'' (1996) are set in domestic households and focus on dying and death; in their personal conversations in ''Ashes to Ashes'', Devlin and Rebecca allude to unspecified atrocities relating to the [[The Holocaust|Holocaust]].<ref name=MerrittGrimesATA>Merritt, "Harold Pinter's ''Ashes to Ashes'': Political/Personal Echoes of the Holocaust" (''passim''); Grimes 195–220.</ref> After experiencing the deaths of first his mother (1992) and then his father (1997), again merging the personal and the political, Pinter wrote the poems "Death" (1997) and "The Disappeared" (1998).

Pinter's last stage play, ''[[Celebration (play)|Celebration]]'' (2000), is a social satire set in an opulent restaurant, which lampoons [[The Ivy (United Kingdom)|The Ivy]], a fashionable venue in London's West End theatre district, and its patrons who "have just come from performances of either the ballet or the opera. Not that they can remember a darn thing about what they saw, including the titles.  [These] gilded, foul-mouthed souls are just as myopic when it comes to their own table mates (and for that matter, their food), with conversations that usually connect only on the surface, if there."<ref name=BrantleyLC>{{cite web |url=http://www.haroldpinter.org/home/lincolnfestival.shtml |title=Pinter's Silences, Richly Eloquent |last=Brantley |first=Ben |author-link=Ben Brantley |work=[[The New York Times]] archived at haroldpinter.org |date=27 July 2001 |access-date=9 May 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110613213945/http://www.haroldpinter.org/home/lincolnfestival.shtml |archive-date=13 June 2011 |url-status=dead}}</ref>  On its surface the play may appear to have fewer overtly political resonances than some of the plays from the 1980s and 1990s; but its central male characters, brothers named Lambert and Matt, are members of the elite (like the men in charge in ''Party Time''), who describe themselves as "peaceful strategy consultants [because] we don't carry guns."<ref>Pinter, ''Celebration'' 60.</ref>  At the next table, Russell, a banker, describes himself as a "totally disordered personality&nbsp;... a psychopath",<ref>Pinter, ''Celebration'' 39.</ref> while Lambert "vows to be reincarnated as '[a] more civilised, [a] gentler person, [a] nicer person'."<ref>Pinter, ''Celebration'' 56.</ref><ref>Grimes 129.</ref>  These characters' deceptively smooth exteriors mask their extreme viciousness.  ''Celebration'' evokes familiar [[Characteristics of Harold Pinter's work#Pinteresque|Pinteresque]] political contexts: "The ritzy loudmouths in 'Celebration'&nbsp;... and the quieter working-class mumblers of 'The Room'&nbsp;... have everything in common beneath the surface".<ref name=BrantleyLC/> "Money remains in the service of entrenched power, and the brothers in the play are 'strategy consultants' whose jobs involve force and violence&nbsp;... It is tempting but inaccurate to equate the comic power inversions of the social behaviour in ''Celebration'' with lasting change in larger political structures", according to Grimes, for whom the play indicates Pinter's pessimism about the possibility of changing the status quo.<ref>Grimes 130.</ref>  Yet, as the Waiter's often comically unbelievable reminiscences about his grandfather demonstrate in ''Celebration'', Pinter's final stage plays also extend some [[expressionism|expressionistic]] aspects of his earlier "memory plays", while harking back to his "comedies of menace", as illustrated in the characters and in the Waiter's final speech:
{{blockquote|My grandfather introduced me to the mystery of life and I'm still in the middle of it.  I can't find the door to get out.  My grandfather got out of it.  He got right out of it.  He left it behind him and he didn't look back.  He got that absolutely right.  And I'd like to make one further interjection.<br /> ''He stands still.  Slow fade''.<ref>Pinter, ''Celebration'' 72.</ref>}}

During 2000–2001, there were also simultaneous productions of ''[[Remembrance of Things Past (play)|Remembrance of Things Past]]'', Pinter's stage adaptation of his unpublished ''Proust Screenplay'', written in collaboration with and directed by [[Di Trevis]], at the [[Royal National Theatre]], and a revival of ''[[The Caretaker (play)|The Caretaker]]'' directed by [[Patrick Marber]] and starring [[Michael Gambon]], [[Rupert Graves]], and [[Douglas Hodge]], at the [[Comedy Theatre]].<ref name=Plays/>

Like ''Celebration'', Pinter's penultimate sketch, ''Press Conference'' (2002), "invokes both torture and the fragile, circumscribed existence of dissent".<ref>Grimes 135.</ref>  In its première in the [[Royal National Theatre|National Theatre]]'s two-part production of ''Sketches'', despite undergoing chemotherapy at the time, Pinter played the ruthless Minister willing to murder little children for the benefit of "The State".<ref name=Sketches>{{cite web |url=http://www.haroldpinter.org/plays/plays_sketches.shtml |first=Alastair |last=Macaulay |title=The Playwright's Triple Risk |work=[[The Financial Times]] archived at haroldpinter.org |access-date=9 May 2009 |date=13 February 2002 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110613214229/http://www.haroldpinter.org/plays/plays_sketches.shtml |archive-date=13 June 2011 |url-status=dead}}</ref>