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Pinter awarded honorary degree
13.04.07
Harold Pinter will receive his honorary Doctor of Letters
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Harold Pinter, considered by many to be Britain's greatest living playwright, will receive an honorary degree today.
Pinter, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, will receive his honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Leeds.
The university is hosting a three-day conference and celebration marking the 50th anniversary of the first performance of his work.
The conference Artist and Citizen: 50 Years of Performing Pinter, running until tomorrow, will feature performances, readings and discussions of Pinter's work. Among the guests will be fellow playwright Tom Stoppard.
There will be a performance of his first play, The Room, featuring life-long friend Henry Woolf, who commissioned Pinter to write the original script in 1957.
Fifty years on, the playwright, actor and director born in Hackney in 1930, remains one of the most significant voices in contemporary theatre.
Alongside his works such as The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, Pinter has frequently directed for the stage, including the 1985 revival of Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth, starring Lauren Bacall.
His widely acclaimed screenplays include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970) and The Trial (1993). In 1981 he received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay of The French Lieutenant's Woman.
Pinter was awarded a CBE in 1966 and survived cancer of the oesophagus before being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.
His connections to Leeds stretch back to wartime, when his life-long passion for cricket was established by a friend taking him to see a match in the city.
The three-day conference will see Henry Woolf reprise his role as Mr Kidd in a production of The Room in the University's Workshop Theatre. He will also perform Monologue, a piece written for him by Pinter in 1972.
The event will also feature talks, poetry readings and workshops and a visit by the Belarus Free Theatre from Minsk who will perform a new work called Being Harold Pinter.
Pinter will be accompanied by his wife, the author and historian Lady Antonia Fraser. Among guests will be playwrights Tom Stoppard and Donald Freed, composer James Clarke and theatre critic Michael Billington, author of The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (1996).
Dr Taylor-Batty, a lecturer in the University's school of English, will join students in a reading of Pinter's war poetry during the honorary degree ceremony.
He has written two books on Harold Pinter, is an associate editor of the Pinter Review and has compiled material for the official Pinter website. In 2003 he was instrumental in organising a similar conference to mark 50 years of performing Samuel Beckett.
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