ABSTRACT
The vehemence of the moral outrage that bursts from the extract of Harold Pinter’s speech about American prisons, which Kimball King and Thomas Fahy have included in this book, may surprise readers unfamiliar with Pinter’s political statements or with his plays and films that deal with political themes. Pinter’s ringing indictment of the U.S. penal system is especially relevant to his filmscript for The Handmaid’s Tale (Feb. 1987), adapted from Margaret Atwood’s novel (1985). His concluding line, that the United States “system [is] at one and the same time highly sophisticated and primitive, shaped in every respect to undermine the dignity of man,” describes in its essence the dystopia he so convincingly evokes in his filmscript adaptation. In effect, the horror of political systems and governments that undermine the dignity of man is at the core of Pinter’s political statements and vision.
