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Exit PlaywrightHarold Pinter, 1930-2008.

By Rachel ShteirPosted Friday, Dec. 26, 2008, at 11:07 AM ET

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Mac Rogers said we should forget Pinter's plays and instead watch him act. Timothy Noah spoofed Pinter with a one-act play based on George Bush's and Harriet Miers' correspondence.

Even in the most formally conventional phase of his career, Pinter remained interested in individual self-delusion, although he traded his violent style in for deft playfulness and his working-class settings for those of tony literary Londoners. His most commercial work, the stylish Betrayal (1978), turns on the unraveling of an affair. Last week the media repeated that Betrayal "moves backwards," as though it were a Hollywood film. But actually, Betrayal is more interesting: It swings both backward and forward to give the short and long view of how an affair both wrecks and salvages the lives of its characters.

But by the mid-1980s, Pinter seemed to become less interested in limning "mere" personal oppression for an interest in the connection between totalitarianism and personal oppression.

In the past Pinter has made plays of politically themed material, because he wants us to see how social catastrophes haunt us as much as transform us. Consider The Birthday Party: The action takes place on the night of a young British punk's birthday in a boarding house he lives in. Two men come to visit, wreak havoc, and eventually beat him up and take him away. But this play is not a protest against the brutality of torture. It is best thought of as a farce, a commedia dell'arte about the confusion between self-delusion and truth. That is what hurls it out of the world of domestic realism.

Pinter's politics today lack this complexity. They rail against Bush, the Iraq War, and Tony Blair. Most of his work over the last two decades reflects this didacticism. (One exception is Ashes to Ashes.) Only 20 minutes long, Mountain Language (1988), is set in a nameless prison and deals with prisoners and torturers. There is no ambiguity in either the language or the situation. There is certainly no comedy. When an old woman tells her son, a prisoner of war, "the baby is waiting for you," she means exactly (and only) that. Similarly, a recent poem reads: "The bombs go off / The legs go off / The heads go off/ The arms go off/ The feet go off/ The light goes out/ The heads go off/ The legs go off/ The lust is up/ The dead are dirt/ The lights go out/ The dead are dust/ A man bows down before another man/ And sucks his lust."

Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise, then, that last spring Pinter announced he was going to stop writing plays. His most enduring and ambitious work, with its mood of disturbing clarity and terror, is well behind him.

Would the Nobel committee have recognized Pinter's genius if he hadn't traded his career for sermonizing? The committee has a history of giving the Nobel Prize for Literature to writers—particularly playwrights—who are also political activists, as if it were compensating for the irrelevance of literature with the force of politics. Political writing offers playwrights—especially at a time when the theater is so marginalized—a consoling sense of immediacy. But it rarely produces great theater; not, at any rate, the kind that Pinter created almost half a century ago, in the days when he told students, "I do happen to have strong political views but they simply do not come into my work, as far as I can see."