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
