Harold Pinter: The Horizon of Human Rights Charter

Abstract

We contend that the issues of Human Rights are central in the plays of Harold Pinter, English playwright and Nobel Prize winner for literature in 2005. By focusing on two of his early plays both published in 1957, The Room and The Birthday Party, we show features of human rights concerns which have been neglected in previous research on Pinter. While the two plays have been analyzed from the perspective of absurd drama, we argue that they exhibit latent manifestations of Human Rights features. To prove our contention, we choose three focal articles of the Human Rights Charter – Article 2 entitled “Don’t discriminate”, Article 5 named “No Torture” and Article 12 specified as “The Right to Privacy” – to show the initial stages of Pinter’s inclination towards Human Rights which became overt in his later plays.