Pinter in the Theatre E-Book

Ian Smith

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

An exploration of Harold Pinter's work in the theatre - through interviews with the man himself and with actors and directors who worked with him. 'Ian Smith paints a detailed picture of one of theatre's leading men in his collection of interviews, reviews and essays... a fascinating insight' - Observer Eight actors and directors who worked with Pinter in the theatre talk candidly about what it's like to appear in a Pinter play, to direct a Pinter play, to be directed by Pinter, to work alongside Pinter as an actor. The voices belong to directors Katie Mitchell and Sam Mendes, and to actors Barry Foster, Susan Engel, Roger Lloyd Pack, Roger Davidson, Douglas Hodge and Harry Burton. Before that come six interviews with Pinter himself, ranging from the earliest ever in 1960, when Pinter was 29, through the box-office successes of the seventies and the political plays of the eighties up to an extensive 1996 interview surveying the whole gamut of his work. Also included is an interview with Peter Hall, who directed the premieres of several of Pinter's best-known plays including The Homecoming and Old Times.

Leseprobe

Pinter in the Theatre

Compiled and introduced by

Ian Smith

Foreword by

Harold Pinter

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Foreword by Harold Pinter

Introduction

PINTER ON PINTER

•   Harry Thompson, New Theatre Magazine, 1961

•   Lawrence M. Bensky, The Paris Review, 1966

•   Miriam Gross, The Observer, 1980

•   Anna Ford, Omnibus / The Listener, 1988

•   Mireia Aragay and Ramon Simo, 1996

VOICES FROM THE PAST

•   Mick Goldstein’s letter to Michael Billington, 1984

•   Henry Woolf’s article in The Guardian, 2002

ACTORS AND DIRECTORS

•   Peter Hall interviewed by Catherine Itzin and Simon Trussler, Theatre Quarterly, 1974

•   Barry Foster

•   Susan Engel

•   Roger Lloyd Pack

•   Roger Davidson

•   Katie Mitchell

•   Douglas Hodge

•   Harry Burton

•   Sam Mendes

Acknowledgements

Index

Foreword

Ian Smith plays cricket for Gaieties CC. He makes big 100s and his batting average last season was 71. I therefore had every confidence in him when it was proposed that he edit this book. His chosen team certainly play shots all round the wicket.

I’ve worked in the theatre for over fifty years – as writer, director and actor. (I even designed a play of mine once – Ashes to Ashes in Italian in Palermo. I called the designer Gomez.) Actors and directors have therefore been a constant factor in my life. A number of them are dead and some are on the wagon but the ones in this book are certainly alive and kicking. It was a great pleasure for me to work with all of them.

I would not exactly describe any of them as shy, but I have never heard them speak so openly and fully as they do here. I’ve probably learnt a great deal from their candid and fearless accounts.

HAROLD PINTER

Introduction

First, a few words from Pinter himself:

He is his own man. He’s gone his own way from the word go. He follows his nose. It’s a pretty sharp one. Nobody pushes him around. He writes what he likes – not what others might like him to write.

But in doing so he has succeeded in writing serious plays which are also immensely popular. You can count on the fingers of one hand those who have brought that off. But, indisputably, he’s one of them. He doesn’t look fifty either.1

This was written by Pinter for the fiftieth birthday of his friend Tom Stoppard, but all of it, with the possible exception of the last sentence, applies equally well to Pinter himself.

Through interviews with Pinter and important collaborators, this book expands on some of Pinter’s remarks. It examines how he has ‘gone his own way from the word go’. It examines the ‘serious’ nature of his work, and how it is embedded in the intellectual and political context in which he has spent his life. And it considers something that is occasionally taken for granted in Pinter criticism; that Pinter’s work, for audiences wherever it has been played, has always been ‘immensely popular’.

All the new interviews for this book focus on the process of making Pinter’s plays work in performance, as compelling depictions of human action. In a Pinter drama, an action or motive may on occasion be unexpected or even inexplicable, but the mystery is intriguing only to the extent that the character or the relationship involved is credible and interesting. This living theatrical life of the characters, and through them of the plays, is a prerequisite for the intellectual depth of the plays, not an addition or complement to it. As Pinter has said, if a living performance does not take place, intellectual resonance ‘cannot exist’.

This introduction deals mainly with Pinter’s background, education, and early years in the theatre. A detailed account of his entire career, or of critical debates around his work, would be impossible in the space available, and in any case the formative years are of special importance for any writer. This focus is especially justified here because of Pinter’s remarkable emergence, around his thirtieth birthday, with a striking, innovative and entirely coherent style that offered distinctive challenges, as well as great rewards, to players and audiences. That style has seen many developments and experiments over more than forty years. But definitive artistic and intellectual elements of Pinter’s work have been present from the start. In this book, the introduction examines the origins of this style, and the actors and directors describe how it is put into practice. The interviews offer comment on Pinter’s training in the theatre, and on the mechanics of rehearsing and performing his work.

Two very significant critical points emerge from the study of Pinter’s background and intellectual development: first, that his writing and thought have always been inseparable from political concerns that were omnipresent in his early life; second, that from a precociously early age Pinter has been a committed and self-conscious intellectual – not merely a person of what the British call ‘highbrow’ taste, but one who scrutinises and mediates his experience through a body of knowledge and a critical apparatus acquired and developed through learning and debate. To argue, as some do, that in his intellectualism Pinter is not being ‘true to his roots’ is to reveal ignorance both of him and of the rich cultural life of the communities in which he grew up and then studied and worked in his early years (if anything, it is in the more privileged and wealthy circles in which he now sometimes moves that Pinter’s intellectualism and seriousness appear most often to create unease).

Pinter’s achievement is the product of a complex individual sensibility and immense talent, but also of his background and early years: the family circumstances, the intellectual and political influences, and a decade of furious work in the theatre, which combined to form him as a writer.

*

Tell me more, with all the authority and brilliance you can muster, about the socio-politico-economic structure of the environment in which you attained to the age of reason.

Spooner to Hirst in No Man’s Land, Act I

Pinter was born on 10 October 1930, in Hackney, East London. His father and mother were children of Jewish immigrants whose families hailed from Central or Eastern Europe. Three of his grandparents were from Odessa. His father, Jack, worked as a jobbing tailor and as a ‘cutter’: in bespoke tailoring it is the cutter, not the proprietor of a shop who is the better craftsman, shaping cloth to create style and flatter individual physiques. According to one actor who met him, Jack Pinter was also a champion Charleston dancer in the 1920s (Pinter has told me that in the early 1960s he enjoyed dancing to jazz). Pinter’s mother and other members of the family were interested in the arts, especially music.

He did not have a religious upbringing, and, though issues of the human spirit and the ‘uncanny’ have intrigued him in recent years, he says that the last religious ceremony he attended, apart from weddings and funerals, was his bar mitzvah at the age of thirteen. Nevertheless, Pinter believes that Jewishness has been significant in shaping his personality and his writing. More than perhaps any other prominent British writer of his time, he has drawn on and developed twentieth-century aesthetic traditions that were forged in Europe in conditions of upheaval, deracination and alienation of many kinds. It has often been noted that most of the literary canon of Modernism was written by exiles and emigrés, many of whom were working in a language or idiom that was not their first, subjecting even the most commonplace words and phrases to an intense and productive scrutiny. Pinter’s Jewish-immigrant background placed him squarely in this tradition. None of his four grandparents spoke English as a first language.

The claustrophobic and intense domestic relations of many of the plays seem to Pinter’s old friends, among others, another part of his ‘Yiddishkeit’ (the term used in conversation with me by his lifelong friend Henry Woolf). Warren Mitchell, an actor of similar age and background to Pinter, grew convinced while rehearsing the role of Max in The Homecoming, that the character should be played as a Jewish patriarch, though he said that when he put this to Pinter, he was only met with a ‘seraphic smile’.2 Religious faith and textual exegesis have a closer and more explicit relationship in Judaism than in many Christian traditions, and certainly the power and seriousness of literature was recognised in the Jewish culture that Pinter inhabited (Susan Engel emphasises this in her interview). In his autobiographical speech on accepting the David Cohen Prize in 1995, Pinter recalls that ‘There was no money to buy books’, and that when he did manage to save up the money to buy James Joyce’s Ulysses, his father refused to allow it on the shelf in the room where his mother served dinner.3 In the memories of Pinter and his friends, Jewishness reinforced the twin senses of vocation and alienation in young men striving to embark on artistic and intellectual careers from a working-class culture in which books were an expensive, and perhaps even subversive, luxury.

Another feature of the Hackney Jewish community that echoes in the plays is the frequency with which names were changed. In the 1980s an old school contemporary saw Pinter on television and wrote to him giving brief details of what had happened to a number of classmates. Several had changed their names – names that in the first place had only been Anglicisations. A long-standing verbal trick, used by anti-Semites and others, is to create mock-Jewish names like ‘Krapstein’, and in letters and conversation, Pinter’s friends would make this device their own, addressing Mick Goldstein, for example, as ‘Weinblatt’ or such, with no explanation offered or needed.

In many of Pinter’s plays the names of characters are uncertain, debated, or changed with no apparent reason. Pinter has said that when writing he names characters only by letters (A, B, C, D, etc), and experimented with the spelling ‘Pinta’ when his first published poems appeared in 1950 (in Poetry London, a small, influential and notoriously eccentric literary magazine). Pinter was justifiably offended when an academic wrote to him in the 1980s asking why he had chosen to ‘repress’ his Jewishness in young adulthood by taking the stage name David Baron. Pinter felt not only that it was a perfectly natural thing for an actor to do, but that the name he chose was if anything more Jewish than the one on his birth certificate (Baron was his grandmother’s maiden name, though he had apparently forgotten this when he chose it).

During the Second World War, Pinter, like thousands of children, was evacuated from London to escape the Blitz. He went to Cornwall. In addition to the obvious disturbances of being abruptly separated from home and family, evacuation introduced Pinter and his friends to parts of Britain and British culture where they were considered neither normal nor, at times, especially welcome. The broader experience of wartime adolescence left him and his friends with convictions which they say have remained fundamental: of the precariousness of life and the centrality to it of art and culture, of the importance of sexuality and friendship, and of the dangerous corruptibility of states, politicians and officials.

In 1944 Pinter passed the required examination to attend Hackney Downs School. This was one of the state grammar schools, offering free of charge the kind of intense education to the age of eighteen that had hitherto been available only privately. At Hackney Downs, Pinter was to develop many lifelong interests. After literature, his main love was cricket, a game he would play at a good amateur standard into his sixties. He has written prose and poetry about the game, and there are references to cricket and cricketers in many of his plays. His most exceptional sporting talent, however, was sprinting, and he broke the school records for 100 and 200 yards (temporarily losing the friendship of one opponent, the future head of a Cambridge college).

Friends regarded Pinter’s athletic success with a mixture of admiration and disgust, since he achieved it while indulging precociously in the supposedly crippling delights of smoking and going out with girls. He has retained a typical sprinter’s build, which is a part of his formidable stage (and offstage) presence: he is just under six feet tall, strongly built with powerful legs and shoulders, and with a deep chest housing the big lungs needed for explosive action.

In his Cohen Prize speech Pinter records a crucial relationship begun at Hackney Downs:

In 1944 I met Joseph Brearley, who came to the school to teach English. Brearley was a tall Yorkshireman who suffered from malaria, had been torpedoed at sea during the war and possessed a passionate enthusiasm for English poetry and dramatic literature. There had been no drama in the school when he arrived in 1945 but before we knew where we were he announced that he would do a production of Macbeth and pointing at me in class said: ‘And you, Pinter, will play Macbeth.’ ‘Me, sir?’I said. ‘Yes. You,’ he said. I was fifteen and I did play Macbeth, in modern dress, wearing the uniform of a major-general. My parents gave me the Collected Plays of Shakespeare to mark the occasion . . .

Joe Brearley and I became close friends. We embarked on a series of long walks, which continued for years, starting from Hackney Downs, up to Springfield Park, along the River Lea, back up Lea Bridge Road, past Clapton Pond, through Mare Street to Bethnal Green. Shakespeare dominated our lives at that time (I mean the lives of my friends and me) but the revelation which Joe Brearley brought with him was John Webster. On our walks, we would declare into the wind, at the passing trolley-buses or indeed the passers-by, nuggets of Webster, such as:

What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut

With diamonds? Or to be smothered

With Cassia? Or to be shot to death with pearls?

I know death hath ten thousand several doors

For men to take their exits: and ’tis found

They go on such strange geometric hinges

You may open them both ways: anyway, for heaven’s sake,

So I were out of your whispering.

The Duchess of Malfi

That language made me dizzy.

Joe Brearley fired my imagination. I can never forget him.4

The use of the word ‘can’ in that last sentence (where ‘will’ or ‘could’ would be more usual) is typical of Pinter, combining a fastidious and slightly unorthodox use of language with strong and enduring emotion. The walks and the friendship are commemorated in Pinter’s poem ‘Joseph Brearley, 1909-77 (Teacher of English)’.

Brearley retained his penchant for declaiming dramatic verse, and years later in New York, shortly before his death, he dismissed a beggar with words from King Lear. Those who knew Brearley were sure that he had the imagination and physical presence to have been a successful actor, but his vocation was as a teacher. This vocation had been fired in its turn by F.R. Leavis, and others, in the Cambridge University English school of the interwar years. That school was then one of the most dynamic and influential of all university departments: one which transformed the young subject of English from a marginal academic discipline into one with a unique aura of excitement, contemporaneity and relevance.

For graduates of the Cambridge school such as Brearley, the essential link between serious literature and a healthy society was axiomatic. Many believed that the best literature of their time (and even that of other times, especially the late Tudor and Jacobean period) offered not only the most telling comment on contemporary society but the best means of engaging with it or of altering its state of crisis. For the leader of the Cambridge school, I.A. Richards, literature was a means of ‘saving us’ from the disasters of the modern world; a world in which the whole apparatus of party politics was seen to be irretrievably discredited.

Though Pinter never went to university, and appears to have spent little of his time at drama schools in formal study, his career remained indebted, through Brearley first of all, to academic English in its early years of heroic optimism. This underpins his enduring certainty of literature’s aesthetic value, intellectual seriousness, and historical force. In this way, Pinter’s literary thought has always been both intellectual and ‘political’. His formative years were enmeshed in the politics of community, religion, class and war. And his intellectual and literary grounding took the political and dissident force of literature not as something that might be argued, but as a fundamental point of departure.

During his teens, Pinter became part of a group of Hackney friends who shared a passionate commitment to literature, discussion, cricket and verbal humour. The group included Henry Woolf (who became a distinguished actor and Professor of Theatre), Mick Goldstein (a violinist and writer), Morris Wernik (a Professor of English in Canada), Jimmy Law (Head of English at Worth School) and Ron Percival. Exceptionally intelligent and intellectually precocious, this group played an important role in stimulating Pinter in his formative years, and if he was ever their leader, it was as the first among equals. Pinter has retained the friendship and loyalty of this group throughout his life. Versions of several of them appear in his writing, especially in the early novel and play The Dwarfs. Two have contributed to this volume: Mick Goldstein, to whom Pinter’s collection of plays Other Places is dedicated, and Henry Woolf, who commissioned, directed and acted in Pinter’s first play, The Room, and has continued to work with him ever since.

With little or no disposable income, the group spent much of their time walking about London visiting parks and public libraries, and accumulating an eclectic range of interests that included contemporary poetry, philosophy, cricket literature, Hollywood and European film, the London night-bus network, classical music and jazz. Above all, Pinter likes to recall that Shakespeare ‘dominated our lives’.

Conversation with Woolf, Goldstein or Pinter himself is an education in an important source of the dramatic Pinteresque. It is a mode of conversing that at first can seem almost anarchic but which over time reveals strict rules. Small talk is absent, and any that is offered will fall on stony ground. Humour is constant, but in the context of an obligatory underlying seriousness. Any personal opinion is admissible, so long as it is stated as only that. Facts must be verified. A careless or pretentious use of language is immediately satirised, often through repetition. Mutual respect is required, but any hint of self-importance is mercilessly ridiculed.

The Hackney group gave Pinter a founding set of intellectual interests and personal relationships of a kind that other writers find at university (though few of them with comparable depth). But the fact that so much of Pinter’s intellectual grounding took place outside institutional education was of tremendous importance for his writing. His taste and interests retained the voracious energy and quirkiness of the outsider and autodidact. Had Pinter been more conventionally schooled, it might well have been more difficult for his early writing to rekindle as it did the dynamism and freshness of modernist writing, with its bricolage, spontaneity, and oblique new perspectives. Pinter also never learned to be a cultural snob, or that one who enjoyed reading James Joyce should necessarily despise writers of more conventional novels. In the 1960s, Philip Larkin was surprised that Pinter was an enthusiastic (and influential) advocate of his poetry. Since the plays were ‘rather modern’, he wrote to Pinter, ‘I shouldn’t have thought my grammar school Betjeman would have appealed to you.’ Unlike Pinter, Larkin had been to Oxford, where he learned that the mixing of Modern and Traditional was ‘not done’.

In 1948 Pinter took up a state scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He found the institution intolerable, and to escape classes while retaining his government grant he faked a nervous breakdown towards the end of his first year. He recalls that after leaving his final interview with the head of the Academy, ashen and subdued according to character, he met two friends round the corner. All three immediately sprinted full-tilt for a bus to the cricket at Lord’s. As they turned into the ground to see the green turf stretched out in the afternoon sun, Pinter vividly remembers that a late cut sent the ball skimming towards them – ‘it was one of the happiest days of my life’. The following months were, he says, a fruitful time spent ‘mooching about’, reading and writing, though he regretted lying to his parents about the plays he claimed to be acting in at RADA.5

In the year he joined RADA, Pinter was called up for National Service. Two years in the armed forces were then compulsory for all fit men aged eighteen. Pinter refused to go. He declared himself a conscientious objector but was not a pacifist, and insists that had he been older during the war against Hitler and Fascism he would certainly have done military service, either as conscript or volunteer. He was summoned to a tribunal where ‘I simply said I disapproved of the Cold War and wasn’t going to help it along as a boy of eighteen . . . I really did think very clearly about the millions of people who had been killed in the war, the war to end wars, and the tragic farce of starting the Cold War almost before the hot war had finished.’ Both the local and the appeal (‘Appellate’) tribunal found this inadequate as ‘Grounds of Conscience’, and at the subsequent trials Pinter was twice fined. (His father had to borrow the money to pay the fines.) He knew, especially at the second hearing, that a prison sentence was the more usual sanction for an able-bodied non-pacifist and, as he puts it, ‘I took my toothbrush to the trials.’6

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and the immediate military and diplomatic tensions between the USA and the USSR, meant that Pinter and his friends grew up, they recall, believing that a secular apocalypse was imminent and inevitable. Henry Woolf says: ‘We were the first generation, we thought, who will never live to see our children grow up.’7 If Pinter’s characters, especially in early plays, inhabit a world of paranoia, suspicion and terrifying external forces that cannot be fully known, it is neither surprising, nor without ‘political’ significance. Harold Hobson, in the sole appreciative review of The Birthday Party on its first appearance in London, commented in the Sunday Times that ‘Mr Pinter has got hold of a primary fact of existence. We live on the verge of disaster.’8

Woolf also shares Pinter’s memory that during the war, ‘the sense of the Gestapo was very strong in England. They weren’t here, but we as children knew about them.’ On a lesser but nonetheless significant scale the Cold War paranoia of Western governments brought suspicion and persecution on their own populations. In the United States, the McCarthy investigations persecuted those who had at any time shown sympathy with left-wing causes, and in Britain there was a similar climate in some quarters, as Mick Goldstein’s anecdote below shows. A fear of enemies within and an urge to promote the nation’s moral and spiritual health brought a sharp rise in prosecutions for homosexual ‘crimes’, especially after the exposure of the Soviet spies Burgess and MacLean. Several actors, including John Gielgud, were among those prosecuted and convicted. Gielgud was fined, others sent to prison. This was a part of the context in which Pinter devised the persecution of Aston in The Caretaker and Stanley in The Birthday Party, and in which The Hothouse was conceived.

Meanwhile, in the East End of London, fascism itself remained a real threat. Leaving the Hackney Boys’ Club late at night could be hazardous for young Jewish men. Mick Goldstein recalls an incident in Ridley Road, near the junction of Ball’s Pond Road:

We had decided to attend a meeting of the British National Party (or whatever they were called at the time) and Jimmy [Law] was carrying a book under his arm (probably a volume of Baudelaire). He was suddenly pointed at and accused of being a Commie, at which he held his book aloft and called out, ‘Why – because I can read?’ Of course we thought this was very funny. We left the meeting followed by a group carrying things like broken bottles and bicycle chains.9

The scene hints at the dramatic Pinteresque: tension and threatened violence are mediated by irony, humour and literary seriousness, underpinned by an unmistakeable readiness to stand and fight if necessary. Challenged by fascists, Pinter and his friends hold up not a broken bottle or bicycle chain but a book – and a complex, intellectual and ‘foreign’ book at that. Far from being a withdrawal from British politics, Pinter’s literary tastes have always had an evident political significance: as Pinter comments in his Paris Review interview, evidently drawing on the same experiences as Goldstein, ‘they’d interpret your very, very being, especially if you had books under your arm, as evidence of your being a communist.’