The Stage

Pause celebre - Harold Pinter

Published Thursday 6 October 2005 at 15:45 by David Simmons

As Harold Pinter turns 75, David Simmons examines the life of our foremost - and most forthright - stage writers

Next week, on Monday, October 10, Harold Pinter - described variously as the greatest living post-war British playwright and one of democracy’s most eloquent dissenters - will be 75 years old. He has also been labelled a whiner and “Good old Harold… always bitching about something” - the latter by Observer columnist Jay Rayner, in response to his condemnation of NATO’s aerial bombardment of Serbia in 1999. But Pinter has never been afraid of the flak his verbal tirades might generate and he can be as blunt and indiscriminate as his detractors. On American foreign policy, he pontificates: “Kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in - it is as simple and crude as that.”

Words and violence have gone hand in hand throughout the playwright’s life. Born in Hackney, east London, in 1930, Pinter spent his teenage years of the early post-war period with a gang of close friends, partaking in their own odyssey in and around the Dalston area, discussing literature, politics, music and art. Of Jewish descent, they could encounter a tough time running into fascist groups, which held impromptu street meetings around the East End at the time.

“I got into quite a few fights down there,” Pinter told Lawrence Bensky in The Paris Review. “There were one or two ways of getting out of it,” he continues. “One was a purely physical way, of course… The best way was to talk to them, you know, sort of ‘Are you alright?’ ‘Yes, I’m alright.’ ‘Well, that’s alright then, isn’t it?’ And all the time keep walking.”

This line of verbal sparring and cagey circling of opponents ran directly into his writing. At the same time, among friends, Pinter was reciting literary quotes that resonated with his own sensibility. The authors of the books they were carrying under their arms back then - Joyce, Beckett, Camus, Kafka, Proust, Dostoyevsky - were anchors in a sea of modernist and existential thought, as well as the richness and inventiveness of the English language. But Pinter cites the Jacobean dramatist John Webster above all others as the writer who really stirred his blood, a writer who received a reputation as having the most unsparingly dark vision of human nature among his contemporaries. It was that dark menace, textual complexity and linguistic finesse that Pinter carried into his own work.

Looking to establish his own dramatic voice in the mid to late-fifties, Pinter’s most notable contemporaries in England were the Angry Young Men, writers who between them were turning feelings of alienation and despair into a kind of collective identity. In 1956 John Osborne - who, like Pinter, was no stranger at the time to rep in rundown seaside towns - had his debut play Look Back in Anger premiered before a Royal Court audience, who were shocked by the blunt challenge to their values they witnessed.

In the same year Colin Wilson’s celebrated study of intellectuals, authors and fictional characters on the outskirts of society, The Outsider, was published. It featured the same kind of writers Pinter had been reading but while the young playwright might have identified with the responses of these angry young men, he never really belonged to their club. His reply to the circumstances in which he found himself, his interpretation of the human condition and human relationships, found expression in a wholly original and complex way.

There was a sea change in British drama at this time and Pinter had caught his own wave with a craft that defied explanation by the majority of those who came before it. Famously, his work was to spawn its own adjective, ‘Pinteresque’, describing that unique prowling menace, simmering violence, struggle for power and all-pervading sense of strangeness in the situations in which the characters are placed, bound by Pinter’s acute ear for demotic speech and those iconic pauses. But it was all too strange for audiences and critics alike when his second play, The Birthday Party - inspired by the kind of grotty seaside digs he stayed in when in rep - opened at the Lyric, Hammersmith in 1958. As with Look Back in Anger and, a few years earlier, Beckett’s Waiting For Godot - a writer whom, alongside Kafka, Pinter has said, “stayed with me the most” - the public could not initially get the measure of this strange new beast. Whether or not they can be said to have done so in latter years is open to question but the way in which the plays resist interpretation has now become one of the defining factors for Pinter’s continuing commercial success. That and the vigorous nature of the language and brilliant flashes of humour it gives rise to.

Of all the critics who attended Pinter’s London premiere at the Lyric, including Kenneth Tynan, only Harold Hobson, the respected Sunday Times correspondent, recognised the playwright’s talent, calling it “the most original, disturbing and arresting in theatrical London” and writing that his “jokes are very good”. By the time Hobson’s review was printed the following Sunday, however, the play had already closed. “It was a great shock,” said Pinter, “and I was very depressed for about 48 hours.” Undeterred and with Hobson’s praise at least to show for his efforts, The Caretaker opened at the Arts two years later, attracting a young Alan Bates to the role of Mick, with Donald Pleasance as the tramp Davies and Peter Woodthorpe, who played Estragon in the London premiere of Godot as Aston.

“Harold Pinter has begun to fulfil the promise that I signally failed to see in The Birthday Party,” wrote Tynan.

Pinter never looked back, writing more than 30 plays for stage, screen and radio - though none, arguably, surpassing the early hits of the sixties and seventies, the pinnacle being The Homecoming - “the only play which gets remotely near to a structural entity which satisfies me,” said Pinter.

His last play, Celebration, was staged at the Almeida in 2000 and offered a slight departure from the political preoccupations that coloured his work in the late eighties and nineties, such as Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes. Indeed, it is for his political views stretching back over the past couple of decades that Pinter has drawn more attention, if not notoriety. He has championed the causes of the left with tireless energy, battling infringements of free speech and visiting Turkey with Arthur Miller in 1985 to campaign against the persecution and torture of Turkish writers. More recently he has been a vehement critic of the policies of Bush and Blair and the war in Iraq.

“A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law,” he said in his acceptance speech for the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry earlier this year, which he received for his anti-war collection War - a book attacked by poet Don Paterson, who, in his TS Eliot lecture last year, said: “To take a risk in a poem is not to write a big sweary outburst about how crap the war in Iraq is, even if you are the world’s greatest living playwright. Because anyone can do that.”

Pinter has made himself an easy target for ridicule with his sometimes crude political views, such as his equation in a recent interview for The Sunday Times of Bush and Blair with Hitler and Stalin. And his expression of admiration for George Galloway in the same article is added ammunition for his detractors. He has also retracted his earlier declarations of an apolitical stance in his first plays - “I find most political thinking and terminology suspect… I object to the stage being used as a substitute for the soapbox” (1961) - saying in 1988, “my earlier plays are much more political than they seem on the face of it” and, just this year, “I was lying… privately, I remained a very political person”. Confusing, to say the least - although his biographer, Michael Billington, is not alone in his insistence that Pinter was a political writer from the outset. Whatever, his work remains as undisputed evidence of a special talent and he reaches his 75th birthday having battled cancer and this summer seen England reclaim the Ashes in spectacular style, which, for a cricket lover, must be one of the most satisfying gifts.

“Pinter did what Auden said a poet should do. He cleaned the gutters of the English language, so that it ever afterwards flowed more easily and more cleanly,” writes David Hare.

It seems a fitting endnote.