Harold Pinter Archive Blog

When do we get to see the stuff?!

This is the penultimate week of the Harold Pinter archive cataloguing project and I shall spend it completing the repacking.

It has been decided that the Pinter archive will become fully available for consultation on Monday 2 February 2009. The items must be viewed in the Manuscript Reading room at The British Library, St Pancras. Anyone who holds a valid Reader Pass would be able to order-up items from the collection (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 Joe Brearley. To gain access to this material you would need to provide a ‘letter of recommendation’ in addition to your reader pass. Guidance on who should provide your letter of recommendation and what it should contain can be found here. It would be advisable for anyone who wants to view items from the Pinter archive from 2 February 2009 to email mss@bl.uk prior to your visit so that the reading room staff can manage demand.

So, what happens between now and 2 February? Firstly, my catalogue will be proof-read by my line manager; secondly, each item in the archive will be numbered with the correct reference from my catalogue; finally, it will be found a permanent home within the archive store and a shelf list will be created.

Preserving Pinter

This week I have been continuing the repacking of Harold Pinter’s correspondence files. This has involved removing all the letters from their current homes in lever arch files, taking each letter out of its individual plastic wallet and putting them into acid free archive folders and boxes. I’m not going to lie; this is almost as tedious as it sounds. However, it is absolutely necessary to ensure the long-term preservation of the documents - the metal in the lever arch files would eventually rust and the plastic wallets would degrade, taking the paper inside with them. Harold Pinter’s literary papers have been given the same treatment, whilst the photographs are currently at The British Library conservation suite, being re-housed into specially made albums.

I was allowed a bit of light relief from repacking last week when I attended the ‘The Golden Generation?’ New Light on British Theatre between 1945 and 1968 conference. One particularly interesting section of the conference involved a talk between Harold Pinter and the actor and director Harry Burton, where Pinter shared his memories of post-war British theatre. A podcast of the complete interview can be heard here.

Censoring Harold Pinter

Prior to the Theatres Act (1968), it was a requirement that all stage plays intended for public performance should be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office for licensing. The British Library holds copies of the play scripts that were submitted and the readers' reports compiled as part of the licensing process. The reports outlined the plot of the play and noted any cuts that should be made before a licence could be granted. This week, I have been digging out the reader’s reports relating to Harold Pinter’s plays so that I can add the references to my catalogue. Some of Pinter’s plays of this period escaped this treatment as they were performed in private clubs, but for the others the reports did not hold back -
The Birthday Party: ‘…an insane pointless play’. [LCP CORR 1958/969].
The Caretaker: ‘…a piece of incoherence in the manner of Beckett’. [LCP CORR 1960/904].
The Collection: ‘The dialogue has the usual Pinter-esque flavour, but the point of the play is anyone’s guess’. [LCP CORR 1962/2660].
The Dumb Waiter:  ‘…stupid little play’. [LCP CORR 1960/720].
The Homecoming:  ‘…dialogue is brilliantly clever’. [LCP CORR 1965/4820].
A Night Out: ‘It’s a very poor and obvious play’. [LCP CORR 1961/2018].
The Room: ‘Another dreary mess of symbolism’. [LCP CORR 1960/719].
A Slight Ache:  (first performed as part of a triple bill with plays by John Mortimer and N F Simpson) ‘Mr Pinter, always the least incomprehensible of the three authors, here increases mightily in this regard’. [LCP CORR 1961/1497].

Further information about the history of theatre licensing can be found in The Lord Chamberlain Regrets… A History of British Theatre Censorship by Dominic Shellard and Steve Nicholson with Miriam Handley (2004).

(Quotes by kind permission of The Royal Archives and The British Library. Please contact mss@bl.uk if you would like to view any of the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays collection).

Pinter's miscellany

Last week I completed the arrangement and description of the final series of records, the one that every cataloguer and researcher dreads – the ‘miscellaneous’ items. Luckily, these particular miscellaneous items are not as obscure as they first appear and can be more accurately described as ‘miscellaneous works about Pinter’. The series includes articles, critical and biographical essays, dissertations and interviews relating to Pinter and his writing, both published and unpublished. One particularly interesting item in the series is the transcript of an interview between Harold Pinter and the author BS Johnson. The interview is entitled Evacuees and relates to Pinter’s childhood wartime evacuation experiences in Cornwall and Reading. The interview was originally intended to be published in an anthology edited by Johnson called The Evacuees (published by Victor Gollancz, 1968), but it was not included. As far as I’m aware, the interview has only been reproduced in The Pinter Review: Annual Essays, 1994.

This week I have embarked in the final stage of the project, which involves repacking and renumbering all of the items in the collection and working on the highest levels of description in the catalogue.

I am also looking forward to seeing Mr Pinter again on Monday, when he’s being interviewed at The Golden Generation: New Light on British Theatre Conference, held at The British Library.