Harold Pinter Archive Blog

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.