Harold Pinter

When lights dimmed on the theatre marquees of Broadway and London on the day of Harold Pinter’s funeral on New Year’s Eve, you knew tributes were being paid to a great man of the theatre. But he was also a noted nonbeliever. Andy Armitage reviews some highlights of the life of the man who gave us the Pinter Pause.

The funeral of Harold Pinter was a short ceremony he had planned himself. About fifty mourners at Kensal Green cemetery in London heard a selection of readings that the great man himself had chosen for just this moment.

Notable by his (or her) absence was a priest. There was no one to commit Pinter’s spirit to higher realms.

Pinter was 78 when he died on Christmas Eve after a long battle with cancer. Even those not familiar with his plays, those whose theatre attendances have been restricted to a Lloyd Webber show and some stand-up at the Apollo, will have felt that something had departed the worlds of art and activism, and left them the poorer for it.

Old Times

My own highlights concern one play and one speech. There were more plays and more speeches, of course, but the one that had a lasting effect on me was Old Times, which I saw both professionals and very good amateurs perform within weeks of each other.

The dialogue seemed magical, the atmosphere palpable.

Pinter talks briefly of the genesis of this intriguing play in an old interview on his website (which is a must-see for fans of Pinter, packed with information, links, archive material and downloads). It gives a brief insight into the workings of the creative mind.

“It was one of those times when you think you’re never going to write again,” he told the interviewer. “I was lying on the sofa [downstairs in his house in Regent’s Park, London] reading the paper and something flashed in my mind. It wasn’t anything to do with the paper [. . .] I rushed upstairs to my room. I live in a very tall house. I usually find great difficulty getting to the top. But, like lightning, I was up.”

And that thought?

“I think it was the first couple of lines of the play. I don’t know if they were actually the first lines. [Quickly] Two people talking about someone else. But then I really went at it.”

Tony Blair – Christian thug

The speech I mention was the one he gave in February 2003, on the eve of Britain’s joining the US-led adventure in Iraq. Several speakers stood up before more than a million people – some put it as high as 2 million – in London, but Pinter’s forceful assertion that the USA was “a country run by a bunch of criminal lunatics with Tony Blair as a hired Christian thug” struck home.

Pinter addressed protestors in
Hyde Park in February 2003.

He would come again to the subject of Iraq in another notable speech, the one he gave on being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.

He was ill by then, and his Nobel Lecture was prerecorded (you can see it here), and shown on video on 7 December 2005, in Börssalen at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.

In it, he said:

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true.

It was not true.

We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true.

It was not true.

We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true.

It was not true.

Harold Pinter as a younger man.

Pinter’s theatrical career began when he was in rep, with the stage name David Baron. Half a century later – after his first play, The Room – he had a repertoire of 29 stage plays and a number of notable screenplays.

The plays that will be remembered by most are The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1959) and The Homecoming (1964). Screenplays included The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) and Sleuth (2007), based on the play by Anthony Shaffer.

Honours and awards

From his CBE in 1960, the list of honours and awards is an arm’s length – and then some. Just the more recent – from this decade only – taken from the page on his website that deals with his achievements will give you some idea:

The Critics’ Circle Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts 2000; Brianza Poetry Prize, Italy 2000; South Bank Show Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, 2001; S T Dupont Golden Pen Award 2001 for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature; “Premio Fiesole ai Maestri del Cinema”, Italy, 2001; World Leaders Award, Toronto, Canada, 2001.

Hermann Kesten Medallion for outstanding commitment on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers, awarded by German PEN, Berlin, Germany, 2001; Companion of Honour for services to Literature, 2002; Diploma “ad Honorem”, Teatro Filodrammatici, Milan, Italy 2004; Evening Standard Theatre Awards, 50th Anniversary – Special Award, 2004; Wilfred Owen Poetry Prize, 2005; Frank Kafka Prize, 2005; Nobel Prize for Literature, 2005; European Theatre Prize, 2006; Serbian Foundation Prize, 2006; St George Plaque of the City of Kragujevac, 2006; Légion d’Honneur, 2007.

He had turned down a knighthood.

Pinter did not like religion. One of his later political acts was to write to the BBC to ask why Thought for the Day was not open to those with secular views. (Those campaigning against the BBC’s idea that only those who believe in invisible sky fairies can talk of morals and ethics and reflect on life, the universe and everything have been a thorn in the corporation’s side for years.)

In September 2002, Pinter took part in an interview with Ramona Koval, in Books and Writing on ABC’s Radio National, in which he said, “You know, I had my bar mitzvah when I was thirteen and I never entered a synagogue again. I’ve been to one or two marriages, I think, but I’ve never had anything to do with it.”

I can’t pretend to know all of Pinter’s work. Along with most people, I have seen plays, seen films whose screenplays he has written, read some poems, heard him speak. But you know that the worlds of activism, of nonbelief and of the arts has lost a great one.

Now begins the longest Pause.

Related links

You can read more about Harold Pinter in Philosopedia.

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