ПОЧEТAК КAРИЈЕРЕ ХAРОЛДA ПИНТЕРA
THE BEGINNING OF HAROLD PINTER’S CAREER

Summary/Abstract: Harold Pinter got the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005. By this act, the world symbolically recognized his greatness. The beginning of his career, however, had not been easy. His first play The Birthday Party, staged first on 28th April 1958 in the Arts Theatre in Cambridge, was a failure. In London, it ran for a week only. The reason for that was the popularity of the so-called „well-made play”, the play with a good plot and middle-class characters which suited the taste and habits of the prevalent middle-class audience. Unlike the comfortable atmosphere that this kind of play provided, Pinter’s The Birthday Party was full of the Kafkaesque atmosphere of anxiety and threat, which could not appeal either to the same audience or the same critics. This paper shows the critics’ reactions to Pinter’s first play and their changed attitude some years later. From the unanimous rejection in the beginning, his plays came to be widely praised. The paper also shows Pinter’s attitudes to drama and theatre. They are important because plays are written to be performed and this is what makes playwriting different from other forms of creative writing.

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