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Pinter in the Theatre
Compiled and introduced by Ian Smith
Nick Hern Books £14.99
234 pages
Dateline: 27th February, 2005
This collage of reactions to the work of Harold Pinter has been published
to coincide with his 75th birthday. The man who has put it together,
Ian Smith knows Pinter well, as they were members of the same cricket
team for which the great man played when into his sixties.
The book is made up of a series of interviews with Pinter, all of which
had been published before. There are also a couple of articles initiated
by his contemporaries from old Hackney days. Most interestingly, it
contains fresh interviews with actors and directors who have worked
with him at various stages in his career.
The emphasis throughout, as the title suggests, is on the man's work
rather than his life. There is also a deliberate goal to find out how
he writes and the impact that this has on directors and writers attempting
to interpret the work.
Pinter in the Theatre commences with possibly the longest introduction
to a short book that this reviewer has seen - thirty pages. Ian Smith
has pulled together the views and comments into a biographical essay
that gives away his academic background.
In a 1966 interview for the Paris Review with Lawrence M Bensky, Pinter
gets close to identifying the way in which he writes in a mere couple
of sentences.
"I don't know what kind of characters my plays will have until
they ... well, until they are. I don't conceptualise in any way. Once
I've got the clues, I follow them - that's my job, really, to follow
the clues".
He goes on to talk of the development of his characters saying, "I'm
ultimately holding the ropes, so they never get too far away" and
of curtain lines (but surely so much more), "It's pure instinct".
The highlight of the book is undoubtedly an outstanding interview given
by Pinter to Mireia Aragay and Ramon Simo from the University of Barcelona
in 1996. In the context of Ashes to Ashes, the interviewers really
pin down what the writer believes it means to be a political playwright.
This piece would justify the cover price of the book on its own, particularly
for those who have not previously discovered it in Pinter's own book,
Various Voices.
The messages that repeatedly come through loud and clear are that this
is a very precise man who, having written a play probably very quickly,
will then not adjust a word nor allow anyone else to. Sir Peter Hall,
in very great detail, Sam Mendes and also Katie Mitchell (who likens
him to Euripides) give an idea of what it is like to direct a Pinter
play. You just have to sit back and trust the text, accepting that the
characters may have no history but that they have lives of their own
and if the plays are well-directed, something wonderful is almost certain
to appear.
From an actor's point of view, Pinter is very good to work with because,
as Roger Davidson says, "the more I worked with Harold, the more
I became aware of just what a thoroughly grounded "Man of the Theatre"
he was, essentially from the days when he toured Ireland with Anew McMaster.
Harold was first and foremost an actor, I don't think anybody should
ever forget that. As a director, that gives him an enormous empathy
and an enormous kind of sense of collaborative sureness with actors.
Because he's been there, he knows what it's like, he knows what it's
like up there and he knows how to help you out".
Douglas Hodge, who has acted in about fifteen Pinter plays, shows the
acting work to be contradictory in that "You have to get yourself
into a really, really extreme state of emotion before you go on stage.
You have to be at a pitch of tears, really, or very intense violence
or anger, almost sort of psychotic. And then you have to behave as politely
as you possibly can". All this to act in plays written by a man
whom he describes as "like Noël Coward and the Marx Brothers
combined".
Pinter in the Theatre has something of the character of a scrapbook,
put together by somebody wishing to write a definitive biography. As
such, it can feel a little sketchy as there are many loose ends that
remain untied. It is, however, filled with numerous fascinating insights
about Pinter as writer, director and actor, three roles that for him
are crucially interrelated.
Finally, there is a question that is not asked in the book. How could
a man described by Sam Mendes as "the most influential English
playwright of the post-war years by - by miles!" still be Harold
Pinter and not yet Sir Harold? One wonders if it could have anything
to do with his political activism. Surely it is high time that the Government
of the day remedied this omission.
Philip Fisher
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in the Theatre from our Bookshop for £10.49, saving 30%
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