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.