Michael Coveney Pays Tribute to Late Harold Pinter

Whatsonstage.com chief critic and contributing editor Michael Coveney remembers the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, who has passed away at the age of 78 (See Today’s Other News).

The British theatre is said to have changed forever with John Osborne‘s
Look Back in Anger in 1956 but the real depth charges were sounded
with Harold Pinter‘s The Birthday Party two years later. Fifty
years on, we can see that Osborne was writing in a social realist,
politically engaged tradition stretching from Shaw and Granville Barker
through to Terence Rattigan and David Hare.

With Pinter, our stage was suddenly invaded by the European literary
tradition of Franz Kafka, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. And what gave
Pinter his special flavour and his unique voice was his London background
and his early days as an actor in rep and writer of revue sketches. He came
out of the badlands of Hackney in the East End of London, working with early
idols such as Anew McMaster in Ireland and Donald Wolfit on tour. He was a
very funny man who loved wine, women and song, and actors almost as much as
he revered cricketers.

The fact that he wasn’t quite as good a cricket player as he liked to think
he was is beside the point. He lived the game with a passion, as he lived
his life, his loves and his beliefs. The citation for his Nobel Prize award
in 2005 was that he “restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed
space and unpredictable dialogue where people are at the mercy of each other
and pretence crumbles”.

Threat and menace were characteristics of his dramas. But they were really
all about territorial rights and ideas of power and control. What went on in
the world fitted his dramatic metaphors to perfection. He was too ill to
accept the Nobel Prize in Stockholm but recorded his acceptance speech in a
television studio, seated like a Beckett character in a wheelchair with a
blanket over his knees. Before lambasting American and indeed British
foreign policy in the Iraq war, he gave the most fascinating account of how
his plays came to be written.

They started, he said, with a line or a picture. “What have you done with
the scissors?” is the first line of The Homecoming (1965), arguably
his greatest play, and Pinter found himself compelled to pursue the matter.
The character’s back history, as it were, forced itself upon him,
inevitably. He became an author beleaguered, even tormented, by his own
creations.

During the 1970s, his plays became fascinated with the mirage-like memory of
the past. He always said the happiest year of his working life was spent on
the preparation of his unproduced Proust screenplay – later staged at the
National Theatre – for his great friend Joseph Losey, for whom he also
wrote one of the best films of the 1960s, The Servant).

He combined elements of mystery and poignancy in plays like Old Times
and No Man’s Land in the 1970s while he achieved a second creative
wind with Moonlight at the Almeida in 1993 and settled into a final
decade of distinction, able to enjoy the esteem in which he was generally
held despite a series of debilitating illnesses and the threat of cancer.
His final performance in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal
Court in 2006 was unaccountably moving, but totally devoid of sentiment. It was the
very picture of an artist in retreat from his own life’s work. A stunning
valedictory.

It was a tragedy in his life that he remained estranged from his only son,
Daniel, fruit of his first marriage to the actress Vivien Merchant, but he
was in part compensated in his devotion to his second wife, the writer
Antonia Fraser, from whom he was inseparable.

I last saw him in public in October at a LAMDA students’ production, directed
by his friend and biographer, the Guardian critic and What’s On Stage magazine columnist Michael Billington, of two short plays. He
was frail, but ever valiant and courteous, and deeply encouraging to the
students who would embark on careers that he as a writer has defined
immutably in the coming decades. He was a giant in his times, a truly great
writer rooted in the everyday, a touchstone for the entire history of the
British theatre in the 20th century and beyond.

– by Michael Coveney