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Home > Dramatists > Harold_Pinter
Thursday, 05 February 2009
Although I promised to write only a
short entry on Harold Pinter's death for this blog, when the
Brooklyn
Rail asked for a few paragraphs on the playwright as part
of a collective memorial, I couldn't refuse. They've just been published
in
the February issue of the paper; they begin:
On my first visit to New York in 1976, I saw two plays – one in
the
afternoon, one in the evening on this quick trip into and out of town
– and
both have stayed with me. I was 14, and thought after I saw them that
perhaps this drama place was where I'd like to have a career, that perhaps
writing plays was something I could spend a life doing. That night I saw
Richard Foreman's production of Threepenny Opera at Lincoln Center,
but a
few hours before, I saw John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson in the Broadway
premiere of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land.
You can read the entire piece here; it's about halfway down the page. Also
contributing to the article are Caridad
Svich, Jason
Grote and others.
Home > Dramatists > Harold_Pinter
Friday, 26 December 2008
The last reel unspools:
Harold Pinter in his final stage appearance, as Krapp
in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, in 2006
Harold Pinter passed away yesterday, 24 December 2008, at the age of
78. The New York Times obituary, credited to Ben Brantley and the
late Mel Gussow, is here.
Pinter's work was central to my finding my own way as a dramatist;
The Homecoming and No Man's Land were among my first
experiences of contemporary theatre. More important to me is not his
style, which is most easily imitated and parodied (I wasn't the first to
imitate and parody it in my juvenilia, and I won't be the last), but his
example, which is not. No doubt we'll be hearing a lot about both in the
next few days; finally, for me, it will be the example of his
intransigence in the face of criticism and his refusal to compromise with
the desires of the day that endures, since the voice and style themselves
are finally all his own. A few years ago, writing about Pinter's winning
the Nobel Prize, I said:
Lear standing alone on the heath is a universal figure of tragic human
consciousness – shorn of the trappings of royalty, of the community,
he recognizes the horrifying mockery of the essence of humanity that
royalty and community constitute. His enemies are his offspring: love
rendered meaningless by death, treachery, his own illusions. Only a small,
seemingly insignificant gesture here and there, such as the loosening of a
shirt's button that seems to constrain the final throes of death, offers
compassionate respite. So Lear, so Hamm – the reluctant ministrations
of his manservant (his son?) Clov still keep them together, alone against
an empty world; it isn't Hamm who shunts his own parents aside, but time
and aging and the decay of the body, the vehicle of humanity; an ashcan is
his own next stop. Pinter's own characters (even to the point of parents
and children; procreation is no relief, not when the children are Lenny,
Teddy and Joey of The Homecoming, the psychotic brothers Aston and
Mick of The Caretaker, or the surrogate sons Foster and Briggs of
the playacted marriage of Hirst and Spooner in No Man's Land) are
not at all dissimilar. His torturers and victims exist in unnamed
countries; this lack of names renders them universal. His simple tables,
chairs and bare rooms parallel the bare heath of Lear, the sparsely
furnished bunker in which Hamm and Clov spend the last days of life on
earth.
What Pinter shares with Shakespeare and Beckett is an increasingly
uncomfortable truth in a consumerist age: that all the money, all the
success, all the nationalistic or racial pride, all the conviction in our
own victimhood, all the conviction in the unerring rightness of our own
cause, all the possessions we can collect, all the children we can
produce, cannot possibly fill the abyss we pretend to ignore every day. To
come face to face with the terrorism of the world, be it a sudden war in
Iraq or the plunging of a jet plane into a tall building, the last thing
we should do is to pretend that we couldn't do the same thing ourselves,
in the most geopolitical or the most intimate contexts. The most radical,
the most revolutionary act that Shakespeare, Beckett and Pinter suggest is
to recognize and accept this abyss, and that, to do so, we needn't do more
than glance into the nearest mirror.
I suppose I could add to this, but I prefer to allow Pinter at the last
to speak for himself. (There will be much bullshit said, positive and
negative, by others about Pinter over the next week or so, along with the
sincere appreciations; I think this will be my only post on the
matter and leave it at that.) First, there's Pinter's 1954 note about
Samuel Beckett which can be found in the collection Various
Voices, a note that applies just as much to Pinter himself:
The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don't want
philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, way outs, truths, answers,
nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous,
remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the
more I am grateful to him. He's not fucking me about, he's not leading me
up any garden, he's not slipping me any wink, he's not flogging me a
remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he's not
selling me anything I don't want to buy, he doesn't give a bollock whether
I buy or not, he hasn't got his hand over his heart. Well, I'll
buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned
and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is
beautiful.
And, finally, "Art, Truth & Politics," Pinter's 2005 Nobel Prize
address, below introduced by David Hare:
Earlier "Notes on The Homecoming" here.
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