Harold Pinter (1930 - 2008)

The Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, one of Britain’s most influential playwrights, has died on Wednesday at the age of 78. Even though he was mostly known for his plays, he was also an actor, a director, a poet, a screenwriter, a human rights activist and, especially in recent years, a political polemicist. Here's an article from The Guardian and here one from La Repubblica, for my Italian readers. I wanted to see No Man's Land at the Duke of York's theatre, but the tickets will be selling out like crazy now...
I really enjoyed reading his plays when I was at university, and I strongly adivse all of you to read some of them, especially The Room or The Caretaker. Here's one of his poems, since one whole scene from a play would be too long to read just now and it requires some background:

Order (12 September, 1996)
Are you ready to order?
No there is nothing to order
No I'm unable to order
No I'm a long way from order
And while there is everything,
And nothing, to order,
Order remains a tall order
And disorder feeds on the belly of order
And order requires the blood of disorder
And 'freedom' and ordure and other disordures
Need the odour of order to sweeten their murders
Disorder a beggar in a darkened room
Order a banker in a castiron womb
Disorder an infant in a frozen home
Order a soldier in a poisoned tomb

Many important writers have died this year and I have written a post only for one of them. I hope I can read some of their works sooner or later and I will dedicate a post to all of them in the month of January, I promise. They are: Arthur C. Clark, Michael Crichton, David Foster Wallace, Mario Rigoni Stern, Es'kia Mphahlele, Ahmed Faraz, Mahmoud Darwish, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Aimé Césaire.