Harold Pinter. 2005 Nobel Prize speech (Art, Truth and Politics). Full captions.

Sir Harold Pinter was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Introduced by Sir David Hare.

Speech commences at 03:04

Fully Sub-titled. Press C on your keyboard for access to Closed Captions. Choose your language.

Few writers in our time have demonstrated such a passionate concern for victims of oppression as Harold Pinter. And few dramatists have been so vastly influential, transforming our basic sense of what happens when we enter a theatre.

Pinter's 2005 Nobel Lecture has been the source of much discussion on both sides of the Atlantic, some of it unflattering, as "from the Right, in particular, the American reaction to the Pinter award has been one of outrage," whereas "the reaction to the award from Pinter's peers has been uniformly positive".

Pinter's official, authorised biographer, Michael Billington observes, "The most startling fact was that Pinter's Nobel Lecture was totally ignored by the BBC. You would have thought that a living British dramatist's views on his art and global politics might have been of passing interest to a public service broadcaster," yet "there was ... no reference to the speech on any of BBC TV's news bulletins or current affairs programmes. While "in the Press, there was also a handful of attacks on both the Award and the Lecture." Billington dispatches criticisms by three of them, "The normally sensible Johan Hari dismissed the Lecture as a 'rant' and falsely claimed that Pinter would have refused to resist Hitler." "In fact," Billington says, Pinter "has repeatedly said that, had he been of age, he would have accepted conscription in World War II ... more predictably, Christopher Hitchens was wheeled out to dismiss Pinter as 'a bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long'." Finally, Billington cites Scottish historian Niall Ferguson's statement that in his Nobel Lecture Pinter "pretend[s] that [US] crimes were equivalent to those of its Communist opponents ..." "All I ever said,"' Pinter himself retorts, "is that Soviet atrocities were comprehensively documented, but that American actions weren't. I didn't go into comparisons as to who killed more people as if it were a contest." Billington also points out that the Harold Pinter Archive in the British Library contains "two large boxes containing the thousands of letters Pinter received from friends, colleagues, public eminences and total strangers applauding both the prize and his political stance."

Harold Pinter, born in Hackney, London in 1930, was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career spanning more than fifty years. His best-known plays include "The Birthday Party" (1957, filmed in 1963), "The Homecoming" (1964, filmed in 1969), and "Betrayal" (1978, filmed in 1983). His screenplay adaptations of other writers' works include "Acccident", "The Pumpkin Eater", "The Servant", "The Go-Between", "The French Lieutenant's Woman", "The Trial" and "Sleuth". He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works. Harold Pinter was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in 2001. He died in London on 24 December 2008. [Source: Wikipedia]

Copyright ©The Nobel Foundation 2005. Offered here for educational purposes only. Apologies for the less-than-perfect video and sound quality.

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