Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter, CH, CBE (/ˈpɪntər/; 10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a Nobel Prize-winning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works.

Pinter was born and raised in Hackney, east London, and educated at Hackney Downs School. He was a sprinter and a keen cricket player, acting in school plays and writing poetry. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but did not complete the course. He was fined for refusing National Service as a conscientious objector. Subsequently, he continued training at the Central School of Speech and Drama and worked in repertory theatre in Ireland and England. In 1956 he married actress Vivien Merchant and had a son, Daniel born in 1958. He left Merchant in 1975 and married author Lady Antonia Fraser in 1980.

British Library

Coordinates: 51°31′46″N 0°07′37″W / 51.52944°N 0.12694°W / 51.52944; -0.12694

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and the largest library in the world by number of items catalogued. A Grade I listed building, the library is a major research library, holding around 170 million items from many countries, in many languages and in many formats, both print and digital: books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, videos, play-scripts, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings. The Library's collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial holdings of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 2000 BC.

As a legal deposit library, the British Library receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and Ireland, including a significant proportion of overseas titles distributed in the UK. It also has a programme for content acquisitions. The British Library adds some three million items every year occupying 9.6 kilometres (6.0 mi) of new shelf space.

Harold Pinter Archive

The Harold Pinter Archive in the British Library is the literary archive of Harold Pinter, which Pinter had first placed "on permanent loan" in the British Library in September 1993 and which became a permanent acquisition in December 2007.

Acquisition

On 11 December 2007 the British Library announced that it had purchased Pinter's literary archive for ₤1.1 million (approx. $2.24 million), augmenting its current "Harold Pinter Archive" of 80 boxes ("Loan 110 A"). It now comprises "over one hundred and fifty boxes of manuscripts, scrapbooks, letters, photographs, programmes, and emails," constituting "an invaluable resource for researchers and scholars of Pinter's work for stage, cinema, and poetry."

Highlights

Among its "highlights" are "an exceedingly perceptive and enormously affectionate run of letters from Samuel Beckett; letters and hand-written manuscripts revealing Pinter's close collaboration with director Joseph Losey; a charming and highly amusing exchange of letters with Philip Larkin; and a draft of Pinter's unpublished autobiographical memoir of his youth, 'The Queen of all the Fairies'," as well as "especially touching" letters from Pinter's "inspirational" Hackney Downs School English teacher and friend, Joseph Brearley.

Harold (improvisation)

Harold is a structure used in longform improvisational theatre. Developed by Del Close and brought to fruition through Close's collaboration with Charna Halpern, the Harold has become the signature form of Chicago's iO Theater and the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York and Los Angeles. It is now performed by improv troupes and teams across the world.

The Committee, a San Francisco improv group, performed the first Harold in Concord, California in 1967. They were invited to a high school and decided to do their improvisations on the war in Vietnam. On the way home in a Volkswagen Bus, they were discussing the performance, when one of them asked what they should call it. Allaudin (Bill) Mathieu called out "Harold", which was a joking reference to a line from A Hard Day's Night where a reporter asks George Harrison what he calls his haircut and he answers "Arthur". Close later remarked that he wished he had chosen a better name.

When The Committee disbanded in 1972, improv company Improvisation, Inc. was the only company in America continuing to perform Close's "original" Harold: a 45-minute free-form piece that would seamlessly move from one "Harold technique" to another. In 1976, two former I-Inc performers, Michael Bossier and John Elk, formed Spaghetti Jam, performing in San Francisco's The Old Spaghetti Factory through 1983. Spaghetti Jam performed Harolds while also turning Spolin games and Harold techniques into stand-alone performance pieces (i.e., shortform improv).