Harold Pinter Archive Blog

'The Birthday Party'

  This week I went to see a very good production of Harold Pinter’s ‘The Birthday Party’ at the Lyric Hammersmith. The play runs until 24 May and is to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the play’s London premiere on 19 May 1958. As outlined in the last posting, reaction to the 1958 London production was not favourable. However, there are some letters in Pinter’s archive that show the opinion held by the critics was not universal. One man who saw the first night at Hammersmith ‘felt that this was one time when a playgoer could be proud to be in at the first hearing of a fine play…the cast was brilliant with the small flaw that the lodger kept reminding me of Dylan Thomas…’. Another was left in a ‘quivering state of shattered stimulation…’.

A few weeks ago, staff from the Lyric visited The British Library to look at the archive materials. There isn’t a huge amount of visual material relating to the first production at the Lyric, apart from the original programme and lots of newspaper clippings of reviews. What the archive does demonstrate is the amount of productions there have been of ‘The Birthday Party’ since its first showing. The popularity of the play extents far beyond the UK, with the archive including photos from productions in the USA, Holland, Turkey, Israel, France, Japan, Bulgaria, Germany and Russia dating from 1959 through to 2004.

Pictures show (from top) productions of 'The Birthday Party' in France, England and Israel.

It was fifty years ago today (almost)…

… that Harold Pinter’s first full-length play received its first London production.

‘The Birthday Party’ arrived at the Lyric Hammersmith off the back off a well-received provincial run on 19 May 1958, but –famously- was taken off within the week. The play ran into a damming critical consensus, as the combined wisdom of the London critics yowled in disbelief at the ‘non sequiturs, half-gibberish and lunatic ravings’ of the characters. By the time Thursday’s matinee audience of six had yielded two pounds and nine shillings (see image), the decision had been taken to pull the play, and when Harold Hobson’s Sunday review presciently –and bravely- heralded ‘the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London’, it was too late.

It’s always interested me that the pre-London tour had been so well received in advance of the metropolitan drubbing: I had wondered if the familiarity of student audiences in Oxford and Cambridge with writers such as Ionesco might have helped. However, the positive reception in Wolverhampton -‘the most enthralling experience the Grand Theatre has given us in many months’- is given an interesting gloss by the reviewer for the local paper at the time in a letter to this weekend’s Guardian.

Harold Pinter was interviewed on BBC Radio Four’s Today this morning, looking back to the first production of ‘The Birthday Party’, and anticipating the anniversary production –again at the Lyric- that has its press night this evening. An extended version of the broadcast interview –in which Pinter reveals an extra line added to the original script – can be streamed from the BBC website .

Pinter the Actor

A Pinter treat on Radio Four tomorrow afternoon, with new recordings of two short plays broadcast on ‘The Afternoon Play’ slot: ‘Landscape’, with Pinter himself acting alongside regular Pinter contributor Penelope Wilton, and the rarely performed ‘The Examination’ with Michael Gambon (rumoured to be hitting the West End later this year in a revival of ‘No Man’s Land’).

Like many writers of his generation –Ayckbourn, Nichols, Osborne, etc.- Pinter served his apprenticeship in the theatre  as an actor, beginning in school performances directed by his mentor Joe Brearley. I recently met a lady called Binnie Yeates, who, as a schoolgirl at Dalston County Secondary School, was an extra (one of the ‘Guests at the Capulets Banquet’) in their 1948 production of ‘Romeo and Juliet’, mounted in collaboration with Hackney Downs School. Hackney Downs was, of course, Pinter’s school, and as the signed programme donated by Mrs Yeates shows, he took the lead as Romeo. Following the publicity around the Library’s Pinter archive, Mrs Yeates also kindly donated two production photos, one showing an assured,  handsome young Pinter alongside Ron Percival and Barry Supple in Act III, sc. I; the other the full cast, with Betty Lemon as Juliet dancing with Warren Robin’s Paris. The  names, let alone the fading photographs so evocative of an era. 

Mrs Yeates later went on to write her certificate of education dissertation on ‘A Study of the Destructive Art of Harold Pinter’ (1966). Mrs Yeates’s small collection shows that her work on this dissertation did not come without its costs- a copy of a scrawled note from her two very young daughters is addressed to Harold Pinter and, in a tone of underlying menace and concision worthy of the master himself, admonishes him for distracting their mother’s attention: ‘Dear Harold Pinter. We don’t like you because our mother has got to write a 16 Thousand word SA [sic] about your play and has no time to play with us’. It is unclear from the collection if they ever received a reply.

Letters to Pinter

This week I have been carrying on my trawl through the professional correspondence files - I have now looked through seventeen out of sixty-one lever arch folders.

I continue to be surprised by the variety of people who write to Pinter. He receives letters not only from the usual suspects of playwrights, directors, actors, authors and translators, but also the less likely candidates of politicians, critics and chefs. Just today I have come across letters from Vanessa Redgrave, Tom Stoppard, Mike Nichols, Ian McEwan and Rick Stein! Some of the more unexpected letters I have encountered so far include one from ‘God’ and another from the actress Sarah Jessica Parker, aged 11, stating ‘I hope we will be friends forever’. I do sometimes find it difficult to resist the temptation of reading each letter in detail, although I know if I did read each one the catalogue would take years to complete instead of months.

Correspondence

This week I have been getting my teeth into the correspondence files - starting with the letters that relate to productions. There’s an amazing variety of letters from friends and strangers, people of all walks of life and different areas of the theatrical world. The letters cover opinions on Pinter's plays and films, both on the text and specific productions. There are also many ‘fan’ letters, letters from students asking what certain things mean in his plays and letters about foreign productions of his plays.

The earliest letters in this section date from 1958 and relate to the first production of ‘The Birthday Party’. One letter is from Pinter to the play’s director, Peter Wood, written a month before the play opened at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge. In the letter Pinter describes the play as ‘a comedy because the whole state of affairs is absurd and inglorious. It is, however, as you know, a very serious piece of work’.

A small note to anyone who does still put pen to paper to write their letters, or anything at all really - dates, full names and your relationship to the person you’re writing to are always appreciated by your long-suffering cataloguer. Although, I suppose my job wouldn’t be half as fun if there weren’t a few elusive people signing their letters ‘M’...

Pinter's Poetry

I spent most of last week cataloguing the boxes of Pinter’s poetry. These boxes were the least well ordered of the archive so far. I eventually settled on an arrangement that involved listing the poems alphabetically. 

Pinter is arguably best known for his writing for the theatre, but poetry is a great interest of his. In fact, there are poems that represent almost every decade of his life from the 1940s to the present, and cover every aspect of life from cricket to death. The earliest example of his work in the archive is actually a photocopy of Hackney Downs School magazine from 1946, when Pinter was just 16, of his poem entitled ‘Oh beloved maiden’. The most recent example of his writing is from a box of papers that was picked-up from his office a few weeks ago. It was written in 2007 and is entitled ‘Poem (To A)’, published in Granta magazine in January 2008.

The British Library sound archive hold some recordings of Pinter reading his own poetry. These were recorded by the The Poetry Archive as part of an ongoing project to make poetry accessible to a wide audience.

'The Homecoming'

I went to see Harold Pinter’s ‘The Homecoming’ a few weeks ago at the Almeida Theatre, Islington. The play was directed by Michael Attenborough and ran from 31 January to 22 March. I thought it was a fantastic production - disturbing yet funny.

The first production of ‘The Homecoming’ was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, London, on 3 June 1965, directed by Peter Hall. After having seen the play I thought I would look at some of the items in the archive that relate to ‘The Homecoming’. One of the earliest scrapbooks includes the original programme for the 1965 production and several more scrapbooks include newspaper cuttings and reviews relating to many productions around the world. It is possible to trace the evolution of the play through drafts held in the Pinter archive - from the smallest pencil notes with characters called  A, B and C, to complete typewritten drafts. There are also many letters in the correspondence files that relate to various productions of the play. The earliest correspondence includes several letters from Noel Coward (one of which was reproduced in the most recent production’s programme), writer and producer Barbara Bray, John Goodwin of the RSC, and the actors Sid James, Ian Holm, Irene Worth and Leo McKern. The vast majority of the letters in the archive were overwhelmingly excited by the production, although there was one letter from a member of the public who ‘found it to be nothing more than a stringing together of foul language and actions’!

Also, whilst researching my catalogue entry for ‘The Homecoming’, I found an article published in ‘The New Yorker’, which people may find interesting.

The Room, fifty years on...

I interviewed a lady called Ruth Serner this morning for a strand of our post-War British theatre project  investigating the creation of Harold Pinter’s first play The Room in May 1957.

We established the project last year to coincide with the 50th anniversary of The Room, produced by Pinter’s childhood friend, Henry Woolf, in a disused squash court by students at Bristol University. Recently discovered original production photos are housed at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.

Although we know that Pinter wrote The Room while acting in Rep on the South Coast, and gave it to Woolf to produce as part of his post-graduate course, comparatively little record of Pinter's debut survives. As a private production, no script of The Room was submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's licensing office, and a printed version was not published until the 1960 revival at the Hampstead Theatre Club. 

The idea behind the Oral History interviews, therefore, was to balance our recent Pinter acquisition with pro-active creation of supporting evidence, essentially filling any gaps in the archive.

We have already talked to all the surviving cast (see programme), and have tracked down the hitherto unknown author of the play that shared a double-bill with The Room, a Chicago professor called J. G. Severns. It’s intriguing to see what became of Pinter’s original cast- some, like Auriol Smith, Susan Engel, and of course Woolf himself, went on to enjoy distinguished careers in the theatre. Another, the late George Odlum (Riley), rose to the office of Deputy Prime Minister of St Lucia, his time at Bristol now marked by the naming of a room in the Bristol Students’ Union in his honour (although his obituaries neglected to mention the unexpected Pinter link in his story). While Ruth Serner, who was interviewed today, was not a member of the cast, as a new first-year student she helped out on the box-office for The Room, and had some fascinating recollections of student life in the pioneering Bristol drama department.

Pinter Event

Last Wednesday, 12 March, the British Library held an event in honour of Harold Pinter, to celebrate the acquisition of his archive. The event was attended by Library colleagues and representatives from the worlds of theatre and literature, including Auriol Smith, who, in 1957, acted in Harold Pinter's first play 'The Room'. Everyone had the opportunity to view the Pinter exhibition in the Treasures Gallery, whilst engaging in stimulating intellectual conversations. Ronald Milne (Director of Scholarship and Collections) made a speech, after which Harold Pinter said a few words to mark the occasion -

"Thank you very much for your very kind words. The British Library does me a great honour and I’m very moved by it. I’m really very happy also just to be here tonight and I’d like to thank everyone concerned with this acquisition for their tenacity, their conviction and I must say their courtesy to me throughout the whole endeavour. It means a great deal to me. I’m not only very happy that this has happened, that this archive is in The British Library, but that it hardly needs saying, I’m absolutely delighted that the archive is going to remain in this country, as opposed to anywhere else. I’ve been asked to make what’s been called a symbolic handover of a manuscript and I didn’t quite know how to deal with this request until I suddenly, by pure coincidence, came across a draft of a poem in my own handwriting only the other day. This poem has never been published and nobody’s seen it, not even my wife I have to say. I’m sure it will never be published, but I offer it to you now for your delectation..."

Due to the, um,  sensitive nature of this poem, I’m not going to reproduce it on this blog, but it will be available to view with the rest of the documents in the archive by the end of this year.

Pictures, taken by Elizabeth Hunter, show (from top): guests viewing the exhibition; Harold Pinter presenting his unpublished poem 'Modern Love' to Ronald Milne, Director of Scholarship and Collections.
 

The Cataloguing Project

After the excitement of my last post, I felt I should explain a bit more about what the cataloguing project will actually involve. I started on the project in the middle of January and spent time familiarising myself with the structure of the archive and the acquisition history. Once I had some idea of the types of records within the archive, I developed a scheme of arrangement, ensuring the original order of the records was preserved as much as possible. I am currently working through this scheme, arranging and describing each series of records. Pinter’s literary papers are being described first, starting with his plays and moving on to his adaptations of novels for film. I am having much fun trying to work out which drafts come first, second or third. In a few weeks I hope to move onto the extensive files of correspondence, both personal and professional, then scrapbooks, photograph albums, materials related to the Nobel Prize and desk diaries. Finally, I will tackle the dreaded ‘miscellaneous’ items, of which there are thankfully very little.

The project will be completed towards the end of this year. By that time I will have arranged the archive, written the catalogue and re-housed the documents in archival standard folders ready for a happy, climate-controlled retirement at the Library.