Harold Pinter was for justice, freedoms and rights

Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate for Literature died last Friday. We publish below an appreciation of him by Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe in London Harold Pinter: in the shadow of a giant Harold Pinter casts a long shadow.

Harold Pinter

Over poetry, over politics, over the theatre, over the texture of the world we live in. He was a giant in an age that lacks them. Through a titanic effort of will he managed to retain his stature and his authority for almost 50 years.

Theatre is a cruel business. It loves to inflate reputations and careers, just as it loves to throw up make-believe worlds from wood and canvas and paint. They sit there for a while looking stable and secure and somehow real. Then they are dismantled with a violent speed, which shames their careful construction, before being chucked in the skip.

shortage

There is no shortage of heralded and hyped artists whose bubble reputations have burst with the same brutality. Coward, Rattigan, Orton, all dipped in and out of fashion. For Pinter to have retained his Olympian standing for so long is not the least of his achievements. He used to visit the Bush theatre regularly. One evening he came into the pub beneath the theatre with all his usual prickly charisma crackling around him. A force field of restrained aggression always seemed to tighten the air around him. It was an aura prepared for arenas of competitive status such as the Ivy restaurant, or a theatre first night, or a party of the Great and the Good.

But the Bush pub was full of its usual motley of feral junkies, plainclothes coppers and festive Jamaican granddads, and none of them paid him the slightest attention.

I watched him as he pushed his way through the crush to the bar and ordered a pint. Drink in hand, his shoulders seemed to slump, and all the tension seemed to fall from his face, to be replaced by a simple and lively humility. His whole body seemed to be saying, “Thank God, I don’t have to be Harold Pinter for five minutes.”

It was the most eloquent demonstration I’ve ever seen of how non-stop exhausting it must be to hack out a living as a legend. Not that he could have imagined that destiny ahead of him when he began his life touring England and Ireland as the actor David Baron.

He emerged from the same world of weekly rep, seedy digs, lascivious landladies and a trunk full of stock costumes as his near contemporary John Osborne. Although both were written up as the great subversives, destroying the genteel charm and etiolated elegance of the post-war theatre, they both made sure they were thoroughly soaked in that tradition before they started subverting it.

Disciplines of form, theatricality and storytelling were absorbed by both writers and never left them, however far they strayed into the experimental. It might have been hard for Pinter to justify to himself what he was doing when he toured the country as Sir Lancelot Spratt in the theatrical version of Doctor in the House, but he learnt to listen to an audience.

When, to keep him above the breadline, friends wrote him into a Sherlock Holmes radio series as a servant who never said anything but “Yes, sir”, he may have wondered whether acting was the right career choice; but he would also have heard in the limitations of radio how important was the music within dialogue.

His early plays are short, sharp and shocking, deadly cocktails of vaudeville and the absurd. The Birthday Party is a lethal blend of patter routines almost out of the music hall, with a nauseous and unsettling sense of danger. It was a deliberate European rethink of a very English situation. The play itself might have died a quiet death, taking the career of its author with it, had not the Sunday Times critic, Harold Hobson, championed it forcefully.

Other of his early works - The Dumb Waiter, The Room, The Lover and many sketches that emerged from the world of revue - all have a cool linear logic and a precise mathematical structure. They suggest a writer limbering up, stretching his muscles and finding out his own strengths.

Always canny with his husbandry of his own energies, he did not make the mistake of trying to do more than he was capable of. When he was ready, he unloaded a series of plays that matched anything else written in the past century - The Caretaker, The Homecoming, Landscape, Old Times, No Man’s Land, Betrayal and A Kind of Alaska.

All these plays have absolutely specific locales, densely imagined, yet they all also occupy Pinter land, a separate realm of the imagination.

Their language is packed with failed communication and queasy subtexts as characters manoeuvre around each other in search of sexual or territorial domination, like a pack of animals in a nature documentary. The pauses and silences, which have become such a celebrated feature of his work, had been part of theatrical language before, but they had never been so definitely annotated nor so loaded with a dark electricity.

remarkable

The plays are remarkable also for the absence of actual on-stage deaths and yet simultaneously for the imminent impression of death. This was art from the bomb age, from the era of universal destruction, an age living under the shadow of Hiroshima, the Holocaust and the cold war.

None of these events is directly referenced in Pinter’s work - he drew a proper and sharp distinction between the work of a playwright and the work of a journalist - yet the atmosphere of his plays is drenched in the texture of the life they created. There are no actual fatalities, just an insidious fog sneaking in through the window. You feel the presence of death everywhere in his work, the knock on the door, the noise on the stairs, the unseen character. Yet no one dies, they all just wait.

The broad consensus that moved through British society from the end of the second world war to 1979 and the appearance of Margaret Thatcher was one that Pinter probably felt in step with. The consensus that emerged internationally from 1979 was one he felt acutely out of step with.

He felt an urgent need to articulate his own feelings of dislocation, and he carried with him a large constituency of sympathisers. Yet it was more than just a matter of left and right with Pinter - it was always more about justice and freedoms and rights. The antique and very British sense of fair play that he extolled on his adored cricket fields had a natural ethic that he passionately wanted to see extended to every inch of the world.

To many this turned him into a parodic figure, the champagne socialist, the poet of coprophiliac brutality, the lavvy for Labour. He was certainly known for his volcanic temper, and nothing triggered it more often than American foreign policy. In his later work he returned to the shorter and more contained forms that he worked through in his youth. Again, there was the same careful husbandry of resources, the same knowledge of exactly how much puff he had in his lungs.

Many writers trip themselves up by carrying on trying to write the same shape and scope of play as they managed when younger. Not Pinter. His late plays - One for the Road, Moonlight, Ashes to Ashes, Mountain Language - are all precisely constructed to match his energies.

He is rather like an old boxer who knows he can last only one round so comes out with a brilliantly constructed fight plan - some feinting, a succession of vicious jabs and then two swinging hooks. Since he did not have the imaginative energy to gather all his muck into a single sweeping narrative, he concentrated on short poetic fragments that trailed after elusive meanings.

Pinter’s final and greatest achievement is one managed by only a select few. It is the ability to shape the air around them. A rank of great artists manage through the acuity of their perception and their modesty before the world, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature . . . and \ the very age and body of the time his form and pressure”. That in itself is a noble calling. But a select few go further and manage actually to change the nature of that reality.

exuberance

Shakespeare not only observed the exuberance and the conflict all around him, he forged from within that world a new idea of what the human could be, which flowered after him.

Aeschylus redesigned ideas of civility and social justice and showed how they could live beside the darkness of the human spirit. Chekhov created a whole sensibility, which the world then tried to live out.

Each of these writers saw the moment they were in but also felt the tectonic plates of history shifting underneath them and in which direction the world was heading. They named that direction, brought it to life and, by doing so, made it happen. Pinter belongs in that company.

The foundation of this ability is a good ear, not only for speech, although Pinter had a celebrated relish for the bizarre and sublime banalities of the demotic, but an ear for the world. He listened to what was happening on the margins of society, on the edges, where the modern is always being incubated.

The world’s largest clothing manufacturers send scouts into the most down-at-heel urban ghettos to find out just what sort of new inventiveness is being born out of the poverty. They know that is where the new ideas will come from. Some poor kid’s witty rearrangement of a battered pair of old trainers is soon afterwards retailing at $500 a pop and is seen on some rock star’s feet.

In a similar way, although with less cynicism, the best dramatists go to society’s darkest places and listen to how language and individuals and communities are being re-imagined there.

By making that new life manifest on the stage, they invite others to understand and to imitate it, and it soon becomes part of the fabric of the world we live in. What Pinter heard, from West London tramps, from East End families, from lost souls everywhere, was the way the world was heading.

He communicated that onto the stage, and spread its influence far wider. Pinteresque is not just the description of a world that was given; it is also the world he helped to create.

Courtesy: The Sunday Times. London. December 28, 2008