Harold Pinter Archive Blog

Harold Pinter & Joseph Losey

Although the Nobel presentation speech concentrated wholly on Pinter's writing for the theatre, his work as a screenwriter is increasingly appreciated by scholars and audiences.

Of all his work for that medium, nothing matches the brilliance of his work with director Joseph Losey. BFI Southbank is currently hosting a Losey season, featuring all three films that they made together: The Servant; Accident; and The Go-Between. Accident is a newly restored version, first shown in Cannes this year (42 years after scooping the Grand Prix du Jury, where it ceded the Palme d’Or to Blowup), and it will be touring the UK over the summer.

For all the exact wit and style of The Servant, I have always preferred the more languorous Accident, a film that meanders with horrific precision back to the tragic denouement that opens the film. Pinter himself has a comic turn in the offices of an achingly voguish television arts programme, a hilarious yet prescient cameo (a mix of South Bank and the Culture Show avant la lettre).

To accompany the season, curators at the BFI have staged a fascinating display on the mezzanine level that features scripts, letters, and other production ephemera from the BFI’s own Losey archives, including a number of letters from Pinter. As well as treating each of the three collaborations, this enticing exhibit also looks at their unrealised adaptation of Proust’s A la recherche…, a work that was never screened, but did find an audience at the National Theatre in 2001 through a theatrical version with Di Trevis.

The Pinter archive contains drafts of all his film scripts, and letters from Losey, while the Sound Archive has a live recording of the theatrical adaptation of the Proust screenplay.

Harold Pinter - A Celebration

Hard to sum up last night’s Harold Pinter tribute at the National.

Some of the best actors of our generation – including [deep breath] Eileen Atkins, David Bradley, Kenneth Cranham, Janie Dee, Andy de la Tour, Lindsay Duncan, Colin Firth, Henry Goodman, Sheila Hancock, Douglas Hodge, Lloyd Hutchinson, Jude Law, Gina McKee, Sophie Okonedo, Stephen Rea, Alan Rickman, Michael Sheen, Indira Varma, Samuel West, Lia Williams, Penelope Wilton, Susan Wooldridge, Henry Woolf – came together to celebrate the greatest dramatic writer of the 20th century.

And the audience wasn’t bad either - a few rows in front, Peter Hall and Trevor Nunn share a joke with Ronald Harwood, while the autograph hunters outside seem particularly excited by a sighting of David Walliams.

It was billed as a celebration, and celebration – hilarious, raucous, stylish, and good-naturedly moving – it undeniably was. To pick out highlights would be invidious, but it’s been a while since I have laughed so deeply in a theatre as I did when David Bradley shuffled on as Davies (from The Caretaker), and delivered his stinging rebuke to Luton’s religious orders: 'Them bastards at the monastery let me down again’.

And Douglas Hodge’s readings from Mac were superb. It’s a work I was only vaguely aware of, and the incision of the writing was a revelation. It’s typically generous of Pinter to allow us to share the triumphs (Othello at two in the morning to a roisterous Irish audience on St Patrick’s Day, among others) of this remarkable figure from the days of rep, and Pinter’s gentle teasing tone never masks his affection.

Similarly, for all the belly-laughs at last night’s event, nothing could obscure the memory of and love for the man who wasn’t there, but whose portrait dominated the Olivier stage at the end. His presence was everywhere, and somehow, among le tout-London mingling in the auditorium, I kept expecting to see him

Pinter and Osborne?

Began to do publicity for my new edition of two unknown, previously unpublished plays by John Osborne.

Despite Look Back in Anger being commonly assumed to be Osborne’s overnight breakthrough debut, he had in fact written seven plays by 1956, two of which –The Devil Inside Him and Personal Enemy - had been previously produced. Although Osborne had thought the plays lost –a supposition reiterated by his official biographer John Heilpern in 2006, I found both texts in the archives of the Lord Chamberlain in the British Library as part of research for our Theatre Archive Project Golden Generation exhibition last year. Oberon are publishing the two texts, with an extended introduction setting the plays in context, on June 20, and the book also includes a foreword by playwright Peter Nichols. Peter acted with Osborne in 1953 in Frinton, and he relates how his intervention saved Osborne from being let go by the company manager. Nichols and Osborne were a number of New Wave writers-in-waiting who served apprenticeships treading the boards in the early 1950s. I have read that Harold Pinter – another rep actor at this time – also acted with Osborne, but I can’t find much evidence in any of the biographies. If anyone has any information on when they might have crossed paths, I’d love to know.

Michael Young, Set Designer

Early last week Jamie Andrews and I met with Michael Young, who was the set designer for Harold Pinter’s first London productions of The Room and The Dumb Waiter. These were performed in a double bill at the Hampstead Theatre Club in January 1960, with Pinter directing The Room and James Roose-Evans directing The Dumb Waiter. Later that year the two plays transferred to the Royal Court Theatre where Vivien Merchant reprised her role as Rose in The Room, but Anthony Page took over as the director and a young Michael Caine stepped in to play Mr Sands.

We were very pleased to receive as a donation from Michael Young some items from these productions that he had been safeguarding for almost half a century. Items included a prompt script for The Room, a play bill, programmes and two beautiful colour design drawings. It was exciting to see the artistic realisation of the sets, which added another dimension to the information we hold about the production process.

It was especially good to receive items relating to these two productions as not much survives from some of Pinter’s earliest plays. The Pinter archive does contain production photographs, programmes and press cuttings, and the Lord Chamberlain Plays Collection has papers relating to the licensing process of these early plays, but the original notes and drafts have been lost to the mists of time.

Roger Planchon (1931-2009)

Looking out from the balcony at the confusion of a biblically sodden Paris- like ants drunk on jam, commuters twist and twirl around the metro exit – the news of the death of Roger Planchon is announced on France-Inter. Planchon was a key figure in the post-War decentralisation of French theatre, best known for his work at Villeurbanne, which became the TNP (National Popular Theatre) in 1972. Planchon directed Pinter’s No Man’s Land at the TNP in 1979, a production David Bradby highlights as having "treated Pinter's bleak text with a kind of visual literality that has never been seen in Britain". The curtain line, apparently, involved the whole set rising slowly into the flies, accompanied by the alarming noises of thousands of bottles being released, crashing and smashing into each other as they rolled across the stage surface. It’s a wonderful image, highlighting the importance of the alienating alcoholic miasma engorging the characters. Planchon’s death was greeted with respect and affection in France, a country whose media honours its creative writers and practitioners in a way the English seem uncomfortable with. Patrice Chérau talked at length about Planchon’s inexhaustible learning, while Libération devoted an in-depth article between its otherwise increasingly desultory pages.

Pinter Celebrations

An email from Harry Burton - who has done so much in recent months to continue the legacy of Harold Pinter, and who kindly interviewed Harold at our British Library conference last year - reminding me of a tribute in New York City. Photos are now up on flickr of some of the guests, many of whom had acted in some of the principal productions of Pinter's work. Good news is that an analogue event is planned in London for June, featuring actors including Jude Law and Colin Firth.

Romeo

I got an email today from Binnie Yeates, whom I first met at the 'Artist and Citizen Conference: 50 Years of Performing Pinter' at the University of Leeds in 2007. Binnie acted in the 1948 production of Romeo and Juliet mounted by Dalston County Secondary and Hackney Downs Boys schools. This production, of course, featured an early starring role for a certain Hackney Downs pupil- a young Harold Pinter. Binnie never forgot sharing the stage with Pinter, and went on to write her Cert. Ed. Dissertation on his early work in a thesis submitted in 1966 titled ‘The Weasel under the Cocktail Cabinet’. In 2007 Binnie generously donated a copy of her thesis, as well as production photographs of the 1948 production and the programme (signed by the entire cast), to the British Library, and we were delighted to be able to display one of the photos as part of the 2008 exhibition that I curated at the Library: ‘His Own Domain: Harold Pinter, A Life in Theatre’.

Binnie recently set down some of her memories of Harold Pinter for the Hackney Downs Old Boys' and Dalston County Old Girls' Newsletter, and she has kindly allowed me to reproduce the text of her article below.

                                                 Harold Pinter - Romeo and Juliet - 1948

              Alas, he's gone. And we've seen the world - the renowned, the admirers, the colleagues and friends - mourning the loss of this inspired man of the theatre and ardent defender of human rights. But, for those of us, his contemporaries, at Dalston County Secondary School,  who had the good fortune to have encountered him when he was just at the youthful burgeoning of his talent, there are private memories which we treasure still, not a trace diminished by the passing of six decades.    

              In 1948, our English teacher, Ruth Sprague, announced that we were to put on a production of 'Romeo and Juliet' - in collaboration with the boys of Hackney Downs. Boys! There were actually going to be boys coming into the school regularly, working with us, rehearsing, even talking to us! For those of us who'd experienced 5 or 6 years of strictly segregated education, the prospect was truly thrilling.

              Rehearsals were a sheer joy, far surpassing even our adolescent anticipation, and became the highlights of our days; indeed, we could be found there, watching, fascinated, even when those of us who were 'mere extras' were not needed. Who could help agonising with Betty Lemon's Juliet, in her intensely distraught monologue before drinking the potion; or sniggering furtively at Eileen Morris's Nurse and her bawdy innuendoes? But it was the novelty of boys' voices in our beautiful hall that was particularly exciting. Voices possess such a strong identity,  perhaps even more distinctively characteristic than faces. And it is the sounds of those voices which have echoed down the years in my  memory: Barry Supple's Mercutio, lyrical and witty, even on the point of death, and his final, bitter "A plague on both your houses"; Henry Grinberg's fiery Tybalt, whose furious indignation at being ejected from the Capulets' ball induced such an idiosyncratic, stormy rendering of  "I will withdraw; but this intrusion shall / Now seeming sweet convert to bitterest gall!" that we would sit and mouth the words along with him, whenever that moment in Act 1 arrived.

              But, above all, it was the rich, resonant tones of Harold Pinter's Romeo which enchanted us. From his very first line, his weary, forlorn "Is the day so young?", we could feel the profound sadness and languor of this love-sick youth, which, as a prelude to the awakening of his love for Juliet, set the whole atmosphere for the romantic tragedy to come. After the killing of Tybalt, his cry of "O! I am Fortune's fool" expressed, in every note of its rising strength and intonation, the awareness of the desperate plight he'd brought upon himself with such tragic irony. When, in Friar Lawrence's cell, he learnt of his banishment and threw himself on the ground in misery, so wretched, so pathetic, how could we not share his despair, and long, with all our hearts, to comfort him, gasping with fear as he drew his sword and threatened, in a voice full of anguish, to kill himself, to "sack the hateful mansion" of the body that possessed the name of Romeo? And how could we not protest at the Friar's scolding, when it was so obvious that Pinter's Romeo was behaving as any young man would, who was facing the prospect of separation from the girl he loved?

            Yes, Pinter's Romeo: for it was a role that Pinter's voice and acting skills made unmistakably his own. He was a natural choice anyway for the young lover - handsome, intuitive, with a winning stage presence and a feeling for the natural rhythm of speech, even within the formal constraints of blank verse. It was above all that beautiful, deep, never-to-be-forgotten voice, mature beyond his years, that made his performance individual and irresistible. With an instinctive power of modulation, it was a voice that could interpret each change of mood, from the casual to the passionate, the frustrated to the incensed, a unique voice whose subtleties expressed his thoughts through every inflection.

            It seemed I never should see another Romeo quite like him. And, so far, in the 60 years since then, I never have.

    Binnie Yeates (Yankovitch)
    1942 -1949                            

L'anniversaire

In Paris for a few days, and a new production of L’Anniversaire (The Birthday Party). The venue was the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, just a few steps from the river, but (as so puzzlingly often with interesting theatre in Paris) resolutely right-bank. Still, a nice vél-lib ride away.

By chance, this must be one of the first major new productions to open since the news of Harold Pinter’s death (though presumably, planned beforehand). It certainly had a celebratory feel - the current issue of L'avant-scène théâtre is given over to the text, alongside a series of tributes and commentary pieces.

I’ve seen a number of Birthday Party productions in recent years:- Bristol Old Vic’s last-minute filler production- with its interesting focus on the Petey/Meg relationship (Meg’s curtain line about being the belle of the ball as achingly self-deluding as Blanche DuBois, a South Coast Streetcar)- and the Lyric Hammersmith’s exuberant fiftieth-birthday Birthday Party. Both, however, retained and respected the naturalism of the boarding house setting, both beginning with Meg’s head cheerily popping through the serving hatch. Michel Fagadau’s staging, however, edged the play towards something slightly more expressionistic, yet without abandoning the specificities of the fading beach-house charm.

An enormous, bare wooden table dominated the stage, its excess denying the table’s ‘tableness’ on a realistic plane, at the same time as it drew attention to its signifying potential. This design picks up cleverly from a throw-away reference (if such things actually exist chez Pinter) to the table, to propose the surface as a supplementary plane of representation… on which. the characters walked and talked, caroused and caressed. The fluidity of Stan’s ascent onto a chair, his smooth stride across the table, and descent via another chair, was visually pleasing in its precise physicality, while the extra plane offered an objective opportunity to negotiate the tension between the realistic and the symbolic that has always lain at the heart of this early work.

At the back of the stage, three large mirrors enclosed the set in the way that the naturalistic serving hatch has done in more traditional productions. The mirrors, carefully angled, refracted as much as they reflected, and proposed an alternative audience regard on the action.

The Birthday Party was first staged in Paris in December 1967 at the Théâtre Antoine. Despite six years of exposure to Pinter’s work, reviewers of L’Anniversaire would raise exactly the same frustrated questioning of the plot as their uncomprehending London homologues had when first encountering Pinter and The Birthday Party in 1958. Intriguingly, the disruption of the production chronology, whereby Pinter’s first full-length play was the fourth to be produced in Paris, also caused confusion. One reviewer, apparently accusing Pinter of borrowing from himself in the future with The Birthday Party, wrote that from a new author: ‘je dirais : voilà un homme qui cherche quelque chose, qui ne l’a pas encore trouvé, mais qui ira quelque part, voilà un auteur à suivre. Mais venant de Pinter, le même texte ne me semble que système.’ (‘I would say: here’s a man looking for something, who hasn’t found it yet, but who will go places, here’s an author to follow. But coming from Pinter, the same text seems to me to be just his usual tricks’).

This new, production, was the first to propose a new text to replace Eric Kahane’s canonical version. The key to any translation of Pinter is the Melbourne question. If much of Pinter is hard to translate, the key interrogation scene in this play, where Stanley is subjected to an increasingly bizarre series of unanswerable questions, must be almost impossible. Martin Esslin’s amusing article on translating Pinter in Germany shows how the question ‘Who watered the wicket in Melbourne’ has proved particularly taxing for translators not au fait with Pinter’s beloved cricket. The worst translation that Esslin identifies ended up with Stanley challenged to answer the question ‘Who pissed on the town gate in Melbourne?’. Traduttore, traditore, as they say. This new translation, however, successfully negotiates the Melbourne trap, though the phrase must sound more dislocated to a French audience for whom the word ‘guichet’ may not conjure up three stumps and bails as quickly as it might for a cricket-loving (or at least cricket-conscious) home audience. The most successful feature, however, of the new translation is its courage to give up. That is, while cultural transposition is sometimes possible, sometimes it’s better not to bother. ‘Lower Edmonton’ could be transposed to a similarly anonymous, almost silly sounding, Parisian suburb (but then the banlieue in Paris does not have the same cultural signifying  force as Metro-land does in the South-East), but it’s less jarring perhaps to omit the topological reference all together, and the text successfully negotiated this tension between literal translation, cultural transposition, and creative omission.

All in all a refreshing interpretation of an early Pinter classic, and a worthy tribute to the continuing vivacity of  the late Pinter’s writing.

One week to go...

The Harold Pinter archive catalogue is being put on-line on Monday 2 February and should be fully visible by Tuesday 3 February. The collection number is Add MS 88880 and you should be able to search using that reference or with keywords (e.g. ‘Pinter’ and ‘Hothouse’). 
 
Once the catalogue is uploaded it will be possible to order items from the collection by emailing mss@bl.uk, specifying which particular volumes you are interested in (bearing in mind the collection is comprised of 504 volumes). A reference for a volume would consist of the collection number followed by a series number and a file number, for example, the reference for the volume containing the final draft of ‘Ashes to Ashes’ is Add MS 88880/1/3 and the reference for the volume of drafts of poems A-G is Add MS 88880/5/1.

The only section of the archive that will not be available for consultation will be the photograph albums as they are currently at the Library’s Centre for Conservation.

Anyone who holds a valid Reader Pass will be able to view items from the collection in the manuscripts reading room at The British Library, St Pancras. Details of how to obtain a pass can be found here. There is one volume in the Pinter archive that has been deemed to be ‘select’ material; this is the file that contains the personal letters of Samuel Beckett, Edward Bond and Joseph Brearley (Add MS 88880/7/2). To gain access to this material you would need to provide a ‘letter of recommendation’ in addition to your reader pass.

‘Tender the dead, as you yourself would be tendered…’

A few days after Christmas, I gave a paper at the MLA as part of a panel organised by the Harold Pinter Society. Although organised many months ago, news of Harold’s death on Christmas Eve lent the panel a reflective air, which did not stop the papers –in their variety of approaches and subjects- celebrating the life and work of a writer who meant so much to us all in so many ways.

Harold was a great friend of the British Library over many years, and we were very grateful to him for agreeing to talk here last September as part of our Theatre Archive Project conference  (an interview that has been picked up by many commentators in the recent days.

It had been a pleasure and a privilege for me to show Harold his papers in their new ‘home’, and to see the delight he got in looking back over his own past through these documents (including photograph albums). In the face of personal tragedy, consideration of manuscripts and archives seems beside the point … a poor substitute for their living, complex, and multi-facetted creators. Yet, in its own –small- way, the preservation of a writer’s papers, among those of friends and colleagues (and the occasional enemy), is one way of ‘tendering the dead’, and helping to ensure that the works and ideas live on.

I saw No Man’s Land just a few days before news of Harold’s passing, and was already carrying the lines and images around in my head when I read of the use of Hirst’s monologue as part of the funeral. As always with Pinter, there’s a certain ambiguity to Brigg’s swift response ‘They’re blank, mate, blank. The blank dead’. Personally, I’m with Hirst who, after a trademark ‘silence’, ripostes quite simply: ‘Nonsense’.