The Life and Work of Harold Pinter

The most significant English playwright of his generation, Pinter has earned, in his middle 60s, this first biography. London theater critic Billington's cautious life becomes, once the formative years are disposed of, a chronological series of critical essays on the plays and the screenplays, illuminated by sometimes surprising biographical subtexts. Despite Billington's reticences, Pinter's uneasy accommodation to his Jewishness emerges, as does something of his painful first marriage to actress Vivien Merchant, who brought his stage women to vivid life but could not adjust to his sudden and overwhelming fame. (She died of alcoholism in 1982 after he left her.) The politicization of his later plays following his marriage to the activist writer Antonia Fraser is explained by analyses of earlier and stronger plays such as The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming and No Man's Land as covertly political. ""Pinter's new life with Antonia,"" Billington contends, ""released something that had long been dormant: a preoccupation with the injustices and hypocrisies of the public world."" The book also deals with Pinter's film scripts adapted from novels by others that contained echoes of his own preoccupations. That some were never filmed failed to exasperate Pinter. ""I've written 22 film scripts of which 17 have been made exactly as written,"" he observed in 1995. ""That's not too bad a statistic, given the nature of the movie industry."" A more complex Pinter awaits future biographers, who will mine this book for clues. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Mar.)