Harold Pinter: Nobel Prize-
By Michael Pennington
The Independent, 26th December 2008
How to describe such a life as Harold Pinter’s, or to ask about his achievement without hearing that ringing baritone demanding (as he once did when asked how he was that day), “What kind of question is that?”
Pinter was an actor and director, a poet and prose writer, the author of 20 screenplays, a cricketer and an impassioned political witness to his times; above all, for over 40 years he dominated the theatre.
When The Birthday Party opened in London in 1958, it ran for a week following catastrophic notices. On the Thursday afternoon the young playwright crept towards the dress circle to observe the matinee. He was alone: when as usher came to see him off since the circle was closed, his admission that he was the author softened her attitude: “Oh, you poor chap ...in you go.” If instead he had sat downstairs in the stalls, he might have noticed Harold Hobson of The Sunday Times cooking up a review that would decisively launch his career the morning after the production closed. It was the beginning of half a century in which, in his own words, he gave his audience not what they wanted, but what he insisted on giving them.
Behind him, at this first of many turns in the road, had been a warm but introverted
boyhood in Hackney, east London, as the heartily loved only child of Jack Pinter,
a ladies’ tailor, and his wife Frances. After various bruising evacuations -
He had tried Rada but found it too class-
And now the fiasco of The Birthday Party. Anybody can flop: the manner of recovery makes the man. For two years afterwards, like its hero Stanley refusing to be told what to do, Pinter determinedly prepared for success: nursing the play back to health by means of a revival and television adaptation, writing three new plays and overseeing the premieres of two written earlier, The Room and The Dumb Waiter. After the runaway triumph of The Caretaker in 1960 he needed no more time for recovery.
Like the death of John F. Kennedy, this play’s debut records a moment in many lives.
Though forewarned a little by Samuel Beckett, audiences were taken aback by a play
that featured a description of electric convulsive therapy and yet was riotously
funny, in which language drawn directly from the street but entirely original in
its crafting was used as a tactical weapon in a three-
Over the next decade, Pinter moved on to Broadway, to many awards and his appointment as CBE. Working in tandem with Peter Hall on The Collection in 1962 he began a lifelong partnership as well as his own career as a London director; he became a screenwriter by virtue of films of his own work (The Caretaker, 1964, and The Birthday Party, 1968) and his four adaptations of others’ (among them The Servant and Accident, vintage collaborations with Joseph Losey, 1963 and 1967); and he created another theatre milestone, The Homecoming, in 1965. The story of Ruth’s triumphant progress through the predatory jungle of male sexual confusion confirmed Pinter’s fascination with the final undefeatability of women; the tribalism of the men proved that an upwardly mobile writer had forgotten nothing of his childhood.
In 1970 Pinter was immortalised by Stephen Sondheim, who wrote him into a lyric in Company as conclusive evidence of chic, and he was awarded the German Shakespeare Prize. Accepting guiltily, since at that moment he wasn’t writing anything and wasn’t about to, he wondered poignantly about the identity of “this fellow called Pinter” whom people wanted to shake hands with. In fact he was pausing, looking for the oxygen that can be as hard to find after success as failure.
His new work with Losey, The Go-
Typically, Pinter negotiated all this by continuing to change on his own terms -
Pinter became a director of the National theatre in 1973; he adapted The Lat Tycoon for Sam Spiegel and Elia Kazan in 1974. His awesome No Man’s Land arrived with unexpected suddenness in 1974: as the play went into production the following year, Pinter started his relationship with Antonia Fraser, attracting a particularly unpleasant frenzy of press attention that would slow down his writing. Instead he directed Noël Coward (Blithe Spirit) and Simon Gray (Otherwise Engaged and The Rear Column), and came back with Betrayal in 1978.
Antonia and he married in 1980. Now came, for lack of a better word, the politics,
which of course had always been there. Pinter’s public role was never, as some thought,
a coat he suddenly decided to wear. He had been shocked into political scepticism
as a teenage by the anti-
So his sense of injustice and instinctive anti-
Pinter’s subsequent position on the US economic blockade of Cuba and intervention
in Nicaragua, his contempt for US foreign policy and British compliance with it,
down to the Nato bombing if Yugoslavia, Bill Clinton’s attack on Iraq and the allied
attacks on Afghanistan after 11 September, were uncompromising; his tireless human-
In the early 1980s he continued to adapt (The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1981; his
own Betrayal, 1983), and to direct (Quartermaine’s Terms, 1981; the Common Pursuit,
1984) -
What the press derided in Pinter the public man were often acts of exceptional courage.
During a momentous fact-
By the time of the 1988 opening of Mountain Language a vengeful press, parked outside
Pinter’s house as if for some squalid festival, had mocked to death his June 20th
Society, a harmless discussion and debating group of liberal-
Knowing who his enemies were but also his friends, Pinter entered the 1990s with
a four-
Pinter was in this full flood of writing, acting, directing and being an eloquent
public nuisance when I had the good fortune to be directed by him in Ronald Harwood’s
Taking Sides. I am only the latest to report his pride in and unfailing kindness
to the fellow actors he directed. You felt ushered towards a performance rather than
shoved or cajoled. His self-
It was a good time to be with him; with great good humour he seemed to be doing everybody’s
job better than they did. He had Old Times playing at Wyndhams, Taking Sides at the
Criterion, and was personally wowing them in The Hothouse at the Comedy. What seemed
to be some extravagant late flowering was really the start of a long summing-
Continuing down to the present to clean up in every department, Pinter went on to direct Twelve Angry Men (1996) and Simon Gray’s Life Support (1997) and the underexposed The Late Middle Classes (1999); to play in The Collection, Breaking the Code, Mojo, Mansfield Park and One for the Road; to take part in two Pinter Festivals in Dublin, and to complete Ashes to Ashes (1996) and Celebration (2000).
He faced the final obstacles in his road with an appropriate truculence and a sense of business as usual. A week after announcing, in February 2002), that he had cancer of the oesophagus, while his own production of No Man’s Land played at the Lyttelton, he premiered a new work at the NT, Press Conference, performing it himself as part of a programme of his sketches. Soon afterwards he released his poem “Cancer Cells”.
In June 2002 he was appointed a Companion of Honour (he had rejected a knighthood
in 1996), and in August he appeared at the Edinburgh Festival to announce, “I am
no less passionately engaged, nevertheless I think I have come out of this experience
with a more detached point of view.” Thus armed he continued to attack politicians
for their abuse of language, in due course declaring that George W. Bush and Tony
Blair were war criminals who should be impeached: “When I hear Bush say [after the
events of 11 September 2001] that “on behalf of all freedom-
After being celebrated across radio and television in the “Pinter at the BBC” season in the autumn, he embarked on a campaign against the British military involvement in Iraq, speaking at the mass demonstration in London in February 2003, contributing to Faber’s instant book 101 Poems Against the War (he brought out his own pamphlet, War, in June 2003), and campaigning in the press. “The US and the UK couldn’t care less about the Iraqi people. We’ve been killing them for years,” he said. “What is now on the cards is further mass murder. To say we will rescue the Iraqi people from their dictator by killing them is an insult to the intelligence.”
In 2005, not long after directing Simon Gray’s The Old Masters in the West End, he seemed to be announcing his retirement from the theatre to concentrate on his political work; War won the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry and he also carried off the Franz Kafka Prize. His 75th birthday in October was celebrated by the broadcast of Voices, a collaboration with the composer James Clarke, in which he drew on plays such as One for the Road, Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes to create a narrative accompanied by Clarke’s radiophonic score.
A few days later came the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature -
He sensed that his political activities had been “taken into consideration” in the award. No wonder: they have completed an extraordinary axis in his life of polemics, the spit and sawdust of theatre practice and literary culture. In December 2005, everything that Pinter was seemed to have fused in a superb speech of acceptance. “I have often been asked how my plays come about,” he said. “I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.” but he was unusually explicit about his work, and his working method. “The author’s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by his characters. They resist him, they are not easy to live with.” he could write obliquely in fiction, he said, but uncompromisingly in politics because there were ambiguities he stood by as a writer but could not as a citizen. And with a great writer’s simplicity he dealt with the justifications for the Iraq war with resounding repetitions: “We were assured that was true. It was not true.”
It sounded like both a manifesto, and, poignantly, a farewell: in January 2006 he
won the Europe Theatre Prize; and in October he delivered himself a great piece of
acting as Beckett’s Krapp -
Early in 2007 came the Legion d’Honneur; and throughout the year he was with us in spades. In February The Dumb Waiter was in the West End, and a film version of Celebration was seen on television. In July The Hothouse was at the NT while Betrayal was at the Donmar. The Broadway production of The Homecoming opened at the end of the year, shortly before the same play’s triumphant revival at the Almeida. Then earlier this year a double bill of The Collection and The Lover opened in the West End and a 50th anniversary production of The Birthday Party was staged at The Lyric Hammersmith.
He had slept next to a sheep on the road with McMaster, but as a man of letters he
became part of a tradition that included Joyce and Eliot. He have have liked to have
a drink with Proust and Kafka -
Now he’s having his drink with Proust, or better still with Len Hutton. For an enormous
public the silence will be felt by degrees, and for his colleagues the loss is hard
to measure. Along the way, Pinter immortalised many people: the soft-
Add to this exceptional loyalty and generosity, his brilliance as a raconteur and
a high degree of personal imitability, and it is easy to see why anecdotes cluster
closely around him. We already miss the Satanic grin, the bullnecked intemperance
in the cause of good theatre that would make him try to stop the traffic outside
a rehearsal room or kill a buzzing fly, and which once enabled him to halt the sale
of Smarties during a performance; his undeflectable kindness to his colleagues; his
half-
Harold Pinter was thought to be frightening, and he was certainly a cutter of crap; but really, like Chekhov, an encounter with him made you want to be simpler, more yourself. For all his fabled belligerence, this was a man of enormous warmth, who made you feel that we were, after all, about something. To have known him was a joy and enrichment; to have been of the same profession has been the greatest privilege.
Harold Pinter, actor, playwright and director: born London 10 October 1930; CBE 1966;
FRSL 1967; Associate Director, National Theatre 1973-