The Stage

Harold Pinter

Published Monday 29 December 2008 at 10:40 by Ned Chaillet

“You think about the plays,” Simon Gray wrote of his friend Harold Pinter, describing the violent rages that Pinter would pour on people, “and you wonder if the genius of them is that they both contain and express the dark turbulence they come out of, in some ways they are more like people than works, you feel you might bump into them in a pub, or in a dream… you’re never quite sure, even if you’ve seen one many times, how it’s going to end or whether you’re safe in your seat while it’s happening, it might come down from the stage and beat you up.”

With Pinter’s death on Christmas Eve, the English theatre lost some of that righteous anger, though it remains there for actors to express, but the English language also lost one of its great adepts, a writer who changed the expectations of theatre audiences and the ways in which we use dramatic language. He was one of the great writers of the 20th century.

Pinteresque dialogue, the Comedy of Menace and the Pinter Pause were critical terms that attempted to explain the impact of Pinter’s plays. Actors and the public found them funny, unsettling and immediate, which made the disturbing late political plays horribly acceptable, anticipating Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay.

Many of the men who might have spoken with art and knowledge about Pinter as a man, playwright, poet, actor, theatre director, political activist and friend had themselves died in depressingly accelerated fashion in recent times. Gray died earlier this year and the director David Jones even more recently, when it had been Pinter’s health that seemed most precarious.

When his death came, it was not unexpected, though he had successfully fought off cancer of the oesophagus for several years and come back strong and clear, after finding himself hospitalized and unable to breathe a few minutes after completing writing his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature - a speech in which he offered insights into his creative process and hard clarity in his contempt for Tony Blair and George W Bush in their wars, though even before winning the Nobel, he had declared he would not write for the theatre any more.

“I’ve written 29 damn plays. Isn’t that enough?” he repeated on several occasions. Considering what plays they were, it seemed fair enough - The Birthday Party which rose to classic status after being brusquely dismissed by the critics in 1957, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, Betrayal, Old Times and No Man’s Land among them.

Then there were the screenplays, notably his work with Joseph Losey, including Accident, The Servant and The Go-Between, and, with Karel Reisz, The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

It was radio he often credited with offering him hope as a writer, after the savaging of The Birthday Party (with the historically notable exception of Harold Hobson’s praise in The Sunday Times, which appeared the day after the play closed). Donald McWhinnie, a visionary director who had produced Samuel Beckett’s first radio play, All That Fall, immediately offered Pinter commissions for three radio plays. The first of these, A Slight Ache (1958), starred Pinter’s first wife, Vivien Merchant, and Maurice Denham. There was a second production with Merchant and Michael Hordern, and for his 70th birthday, Pinter took on the role himself in 2000 for Radio 4.

The last new dramatic work in his lifetime was a piece for radio, a collaboration with the composer James Clarke on a text by Pinter, which brought together fragments from five of his late plays in a harrowing acoustic evocation of torturers and the tortured. Voices was broadcast on Radio 3 for Pinter’s 75th birthday.

Born in Hackney, east London, on October 10, 1930, Pinter’s first inclination was to write poetry, as was his last. He became an actor in his teenage years, finding work on BBC Radio and taking scores of roles in rep. His time working in Ireland for the actor manager Anew McMaster made a lasting impact, unlike two terms at RADA in 1948, which he declined to discuss. In the months before his death he did take on the role of president of the Central School of Speech and Drama, of which he had fonder memories.

While it was primarily as a writer that Pinter was known after 1957, he continued to act and, even more significantly, to direct. His productions of the plays of Simon Gray, beginning with Butley in 1971 - which also cemented both their relationships with Alan Bates - were as notable as Peter Hall’s productions of Pinter’s plays. It was his production of Exiles in 1970 that restored the reputation of James Joyce’s only play. (It was also a concrete link to his dramatic heritage. Beckett had followed Joyce and Pinter followed Beckett. He sent his plays to Beckett for a response until Beckett’s death, and David Mamet had done the same to Pinter.)

Pinter’s notorious unwillingness to explain his plays was not a defensive strategy - the actor and playwright Robert Shaw complained that Pinter the director had made him justify every line in his play The Man in the Glass Booth, but refused to elaborate any of his own lines when Shaw was performing in that elusive, erotic mystery Old Times. When we were recording Old Times for radio, the actors (Cheryl Campbell, Julia Ormond and Michael Pennington) went through a read-through with Pinter, where he corrected misplaced commas in the script, but respectfully declined to ask about their characters. Midway through lunch, with Pinter midway through a decent bottle of white wine, he suddenly hit the table and said: “Nobody’s asked me about the fucking play!” He went on to explain there were three things he knew about the play, and what they were.

When we were recording his 1958 radio drama A Slight Ache for his 70th birthday, where Pinter mused on how tough he had made it on the actor who had to lie on the floor for the conclusion of the play - Denham and Hordern in previous productions and it was now Pinter’s turn - and he revealed that he never knew where the play had come from. It must, he thought, have had something to do with his evacuation to Cornwall during the war. He also pointed to a celebrated stage direction - the original publication of the script had instructed a “silent pause” when it should be a “slight” pause. All pauses are silent, he said.

Stories that will circulate may improve with the telling: famously he sent his fellow cricket-loving dramatist Gray his 11-word poem, which ran: “I saw Len Hutton in his prime/Another time/another time.”

Surprised to have no reaction, he rang a week later to ask what Gray thought. “I haven’t finished reading it yet.”

When there was a move to have the Comedy Theatre renamed the Pinter because of Pinter’s connection, Tom Stoppard thought it would be worth considering the playwright changing his name to Harold Comedy.

There were the biographical entanglements that coloured his work. When his first marriage to Merchant ended and he married the writer Lady Antonia Fraser, it was the stuff of headlines. The revelation that Betrayal, famously the story of marital deceptions told backwards, was based on his own relationship with Michael and Joan Bakewell, the papers again took note.

He was not without honour in his own country. Although he declined a knighthood from John Major’s government, he was made a Companion of Honour in 2002. Nor did his condemnation of the United State’s international policy alienate him from the American stage. It was New York’s Lincoln Center that put on nine plays in a Pinter Festival in 2001. When The Homecoming was revived on Broadway in 2007, 40 years after its premiere, the critic John Lahr questioned Pinter whether he still had the ferocity to write plays. “I still have quite a bit of ferocity knocking around,” he told Lahr. “It’s how to embody it.”

That ferocity will be missed.

Pinter leaves his wife, Antonia Fraser, and a son from his first marriage.