Harold Pinter, CH, CBE (1930-2008)
Michael Rhodes
poet, actor, director, and screenwriter, and the most original,
stylish and enigmatic writer in the post-war revival of British
theatre.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7800829.stm
Pinter was appointed CBE in 1966, CLit in 1998 and a Companion of
Honour in 2002. He was an associate director of the National Theatre,
London, from 1973 to 1983. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 2005.
He is survived by his second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, whom he
married in 1980, a son from his first marriage, three stepsons and
three stepdaughters.
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Michael Rhodes
of cancer on December 24, 2008, aged 78
Among contemporary dramatists Harold Pinter holds a unique place. Few,
if any, have so lastingly and so profoundly influenced fellow
playwrights — not just in this country but also beyond. And none has
been so garlanded with high honours. A CBE at 36, he was made a
Companion of Honour in 2002 and, in 2005, won the Nobel Prize for
Literature.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5397295.ece
His incomparable, highly charged writing had, throughout his career,
been allied to and fed by his less celebrated work as an actor. Before
he was 30, he had acted 100 or more roles in the hard slog of regional
rep. These ranged from maniacal killer, policeman and bank manager, to
Iago, John Worthing, Mr Rochester, Maxim de Winter in Rebecca and —
intriguingly — Lancelot Spratt in Doctor in the House.
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Michael Rhodes
achievement without hearing that ringing baritone demanding (as he
once did when asked how he was that day), "What kind of a 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.
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Michael Rhodes
Further to the obituary of Harold Pinter (26 December), he wasn't just
a good director – he was the best, writes Michael Gambon. Harold was
very plain speaking, not really going in for lavish phrases.
And it was always clear that he was at heart a very fun guy. People
say that he was sour but that was never my experience; rather one got
a sense of his playfulness. Often he'd have a drink and a fag, back in
the day when he used to smoke, that is. Not whisky, as some people
said – beer, usually, or maybe a glass of white wine. He'd sit quite
still on his chair, watching rehearsals proceed.
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Michael Rhodes
influential, provocative and poetic dramatist of his generation. He
enjoyed parallel careers as an actor, screenwriter and director. He
was also a vigorous political polemicist, but it is for his plays that
he will be best remembered, and for his ability to create dramatic
poetry out of everyday speech. Among the dramatists of the last 50
years, Samuel Beckett is his only serious rival in terms of theatrical
influence, and it is a measure of Pinter's power that early on he
spawned the adjective "Pinteresque", suggesting a cryptically
mysterious situation imbued with hidden menace.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/dec/27/harold-pinter-obituary-playwright-politics
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Hyfler/Rosner
"Michael Rhodes" <mig73alle...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in
message news:d2709dad-fc68-4157-a0e0-
Harold Pinter: Nobel Prize-winning playwright and poet who
dominated British theatre for four decades
By Michael Pennington
Friday, 26 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 a 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 weekfollowing catastrophic notices. On the Thursday
afternoon the youngplaywright crept towards the dress circle
to observe the matinée. He was alone: when an usher came to
see him off since the circle was closed, his admission that
he was the authorsoftened 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 – but also plenty of London in the Blitz –
Pinter found a place at Hackney Downs Grammar School, where
he met his great English teacher and mentor, Joe Brearley,
with whom he would walk from Springfield Park to Bethnal
Green shouting speeches from The Duchess of Malfi and The
Revenger's Tragedy at the trolley buses, and under whose
direction he played Macbeth and Romeo. Then, to Jack's and
Frances's horror, he was twice arrested and fined as a
conscientious objector to National Service; expecting the
worst, he took his toothbrush to the tribunal.
He had tried Rada but found it too class-bound and dropped
out, then done a two-year stretch as an actor in Anew
McMaster's touring company in Ireland, playing everything
from the Greeks to Shakespeare to Wilde to Agatha Christie –
the experience left him with a rhapsodic regard for
barnstorming classical acting, though he subsequently had
little formally to do with it. Then there was a novel, The
Dwarfs (which he later dramatised), three years in rep, his
first marriage, to the actress Vivien Merchant, and the
birth of their son Daniel.
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 début 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-sided battle for large and small
advantage. The Caretaker has played all over the world, in
an infinite variety of ways, its three great parts
attracting a host of actors and endless celebration and
debate.
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-Between, would win the Palme
d'Or at Cannes in 1971, but he was seriously reviewing how
to go forward in the theatre; he knew that he couldn't
travel any further with "this bunch of people who open doors
and come in and go out", but it was taking some time to
settle the alternative. At 40, his own landscape was
changing; his marriage was beginning to disintegrate, and
while some of his generation were hesitant, a new generation
of more evidently political playwrights – Hare, Edgar,
Brenton, Griffiths – was beginning to move into the light.
Typically, Pinter negotiated all this by continuing to
change on his own terms – his work becoming if anything more
internal, preoccupied with time, human solitude and
separation. In Old Times (1971) he suggested how the past
could be continually reinvented: this fascination with
creative memory had already been broached in Landscape and
Silence in 1969. He then spent 12 months, which he described
as a kind of homecoming, "swallowed up" in adapting Proust's
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, a period of great personal
satisfaction but practical disappointment: the screenplay
was never filmed, though it was published, and finally
adapted for the theatre in 2000.
Pinter became a director of the National Theatre in 1973; he
adapted The Last 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 teenager by the anti-Semitism and
anti-Communism (under a Labour government) of the immediate
post-war years, and he never forgot the way one of the
judges at his military tribunal for conscientious objection
had falsified his testimony, accusing him of being a man who
wouldn't defend his sister in time of war.
So his sense of injustice and instinctive
anti-authoritarianism were deep in the bone; in the 1970s he
had already attacked American involvement in the overthrow
of Allende in Chile and defended the Soviet internee
Vladimir Bukovsky. However, the Eighties press, still tumid
over his love life, responded to this apparent new turn with
the special fury aimed at the writer who gets too big for
his boots, that greatest of English sins.
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 of Yugoslavia, Bill Clinton's attack on Iraq
and the allied attacks on Afghanistan after 11 September,
were uncompromising; his tireless human-rights campaigning
and scrutiny of the meretricious language of politics he
might, almost, choose as his epitaph.
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) – but his political work both slowed down his original
writing and sharpened its aim. The tremendous triple bill
"Other Places" in 1982 was followed by a two-year silence
broken by the sound of a bullet – the brief One for the
Road, on the subject of state-authorised torture, written in
a single enraged breath one night after an encounter at a
party.
What the press derided in Pinter the public man were often
acts of exceptional courage. During a momentous fact-finding
visit to Turkey in 1985 with Arthur Miller (they were
Vice-Presidents of Pen, and, the more you think about it,
natural partners as citizens and writers), Pinter exploded
at a journalist during a dinner in the US Embassy and
effectively had them barred from the country. That was the
headline, but the week they spent there thrust the torture
in detention of hundreds of thousands of that country's
"political" prisoners inescapably under English and American
noses – and also engendered the first draft of the 20-minute
Mountain Language, dealing with the brutal suppression of
minority culture. Oddly, when a group of Kurdish actors
rehearsed a revival of the play in north London in 1996 the
police, accompanied by helicopters and marksmen, arrested
them for carrying (prop) weapons and forbade them to
communicate in their own language – the very matter of the
play.
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-to-left
writers and broadcasters: its public damnation is a measure
of the intolerance sluicing through the media during the
Thatcher years.
Knowing who his enemies were but also his friends, Pinter
entered the 1990s with a four-hour radio tribute, Pinter at
Sixty, but with the press still on his back and a rare
disappointment in his screenwriting career – Remains of the
Day, an assignment which for various reasons he didn't
finish. His sharp eye on what he used to call "the state of
affairs" didn't miss the deportation of Iraqis at the
beginning of the Gulf War, and he wrote a savage short poem,
"American Football", which blew the euphemisms off the
rhetoric that followed Operation Desert Storm, and which the
broadsheets refused to publish. Party Time and A New World
Order (both 1991) expressed the same anger dramatically.
There were major revivals of The Homecoming, The Birthday
Party and Betrayal (which the critics finally approved), and
Donald Pleasance, the original Davies in The Caretaker,
appeared in the part once more. Pinter himself returned to
the stage in No Man's Land at the Almeida in 1992: his
mother Frances died, and the beautiful Moonlight the
following year was in many ways the result.
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-effacement was that of a carpenter working
on a perfect chair: he worked with the same economy that
perhaps lay behind the speech in The Dwarfs when a
nutcracker is criticised as an inefficient instrument for
cracking a nut because of the unnecessary friction at the
hinge. There was no carry-on, only the gentlest authority,
punctuality and discipline, affection and trust.
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 the 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-up on all
fronts.
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 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-loving people we are going to
continue to fight terrorism" and so on, I wonder what
"freedom-hating people" look like: I've never met such
people myself or can't even conceive of it. In other words,
he is talking rubbish."
After being celebrated across radio and television in the
"Pinter at the BBC" season in the autumn, he embarked on a
campaign against British military involvement in Iraq,
speaking at the mass demonstration in London in February
2003, contributing to Faber's instant book 101 Poems Against
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 an 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 – news which he seems to have received on the
telephone with something closer to a Pinter silence than a
Pinter pause: "I was speechless." One news channel announced
that he was dead, then changed its mind and confirmed that
he had won the Nobel Prize. "So I've risen from the dead."
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. Some farewell : in January 2006 he won the Europe
Theatre Prize; and in October he delivered himself of a
great piece of acting as Beckett's Krapp – fortunately
recorded for posterity, as was his radio performance the
next spring as Max in The Homecoming.
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 would have liked to have a
drink with Proust and Kafka – but, as he said, he never got
around to it. Reams have been written about him as a writer,
not all of it irrelevant, and he has, of course, earned his
own personalised adjective, usually seriously misapplied.
His ear for the vernacular was unerring, his comic
escalations riot-ous; his sense of personal politics
included the "piss-take", that means of mocking others
without their being quite sure of it. He redistributed the
weight of language in the theatre; he was able to make a
word or a silence travel in a way that was at once poetic
and hilarious; he believed that every sentence written
should pay for its keep. His originality, the breadth and
depth of his gifts, the thoroughness with which he
reorganised his audience, bucked his critics and embraced
his citizenship, have been fabulous.
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-hearted usher on The Birthday Party, Anew McMaster; Joe
Brearley; even the disgruntled box-office clerk at a theatre
who didn't recognise him, and when reminded replied with a
verbal quirk – "Why would I know that?" – which delighted
him. For a man of such pride, his sense of self-mockery was
acute.
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-serious
fury at half-imagined slights.
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 1973-83; CLit 1998; CH 2002; Nobel Prize
for Literature 2005; married 1956 Vivien Merchant (died
1982; one son; marriage dissolved 1980), 1980 Lady Antonia
Fraser (née Pakenham); died 24 December 2008.
Michael Rhodes
playwright was interred close to the graves of Thackeray, Trollope and
Wilkie Collins. The service was stripped of any religious trappings.
No priest, or rabbi, and with only one exception the text from the
ceremony came from Pinter's own pen. Sir Michael Gambon gave four of
the eight readings. Lady Antonia Pinter's granddaughter Stella Powell
Jones gave another reading. As Pinter was lowered into the earth his
widow stepped forward: "Goodnight sweet prince. And flights of angels
sing thee to thy rest."
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