No Last Word: Pausing to Praise Pinter

In his 2025 paean to Harold Pinter, David Erdos provides analyses of Pinter’s multiple genres to illustrate, demonstrate, and celebrate Harold Pinter’s distinctive and extraordinary talents as an author of plays, poetry, and filmscripts, his talents as a performer and director, and his insights into the inequities of contemporary power politics. Characterizing Pinter as a “conscientious objector,” Erdos maps the many ways Pinter’s art presents, delineates, locates, and makes evident the weaknesses and hypocrisy of political power, the persistent possibilities of sudden violence, and defiance against declarations of status quo. “Like all great art,” Erdos comments, “Pinter worked for the why as opposed to the what” (61). And, as Erdos continues, “That he never provided easy answers or solutions only enforced the crucial fact that art, if it has any active or positive use at all, is, and can only be concerned with defining the questions that, if they do nothing else, both allow for, and all too often provide the context within which humanity currently defines its strengths and limitations” (62).Erdos describes, analyzes, and comments upon the BBC’s filmed productions of Pinter’s plays, showing the ways the performances enact the “why” and pose the questions that define contemporary culture. In so doing, Erdos demonstrates the many ways Pinter’s perspective and talents developed through his work, as they enacted a continually sharper focus on the “why,” as they illustrated metaphorically the enclosed situations in which humans often operate, leading ultimately to enactments of Pinter’s “direct engagement with politics” (130). In so far as Erdos’s analyses are enfolded within an opening and a finale constituted by groups of poems and one “Playlet,” Harold in Hammersmith, Erdos’ accolade not only analyzes, demonstrates, and comments, but in itself enacts some of the essence of Pinter’s practice and perspective.