Harold Pinter Archive Blog

‘Tender the dead, as you yourself would be tendered…’

A few days after Christmas, I gave a paper at the MLA as part of a panel organised by the Harold Pinter Society. Although organised many months ago, news of Harold’s death on Christmas Eve lent the panel a reflective air, which did not stop the papers –in their variety of approaches and subjects- celebrating the life and work of a writer who meant so much to us all in so many ways.

Harold was a great friend of the British Library over many years, and we were very grateful to him for agreeing to talk here last September as part of our Theatre Archive Project conference  (an interview that has been picked up by many commentators in the recent days.

It had been a pleasure and a privilege for me to show Harold his papers in their new ‘home’, and to see the delight he got in looking back over his own past through these documents (including photograph albums). In the face of personal tragedy, consideration of manuscripts and archives seems beside the point … a poor substitute for their living, complex, and multi-facetted creators. Yet, in its own –small- way, the preservation of a writer’s papers, among those of friends and colleagues (and the occasional enemy), is one way of ‘tendering the dead’, and helping to ensure that the works and ideas live on.

I saw No Man’s Land just a few days before news of Harold’s passing, and was already carrying the lines and images around in my head when I read of the use of Hirst’s monologue as part of the funeral. As always with Pinter, there’s a certain ambiguity to Brigg’s swift response ‘They’re blank, mate, blank. The blank dead’. Personally, I’m with Hirst who, after a trademark ‘silence’, ripostes quite simply: ‘Nonsense’.

Golden Generation

Our exhibition on post-War British theatre opened today in the Folio Society Gallery at the British Library.

The exhibition – The Golden Generation: British Theatre 1945-68 -  demonstrates the variety, dynamism, and vision of actors, directors and writers that flourished in British theatre between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the abolition of theatre censorship in 1968, using manuscripts, letters, oral history interviews, and photos from our collections.

I’m particularly pleased at the way we’ve combined iconic original items – handwritten drafts of Pinter, Osborne, Rattigan et al., the gloves Olivier wore in The Entertainer, a John Betjeman dust-jacket from Islington Library defaced by Joe Orton- alongside specially commissioned oral history interviews available at sound points. These interviews were conducted for the collaborative (with Sheffield University) Theatre Archive Project, and allowed those who visited or worked in post-War theatre to share their recollections for the first time. Interviewees featured include Murray Melvin, who played Geof in the stage and film versions of A Taste of Honey; Michael Seymour, a stage electrician at the Royal Court who looked down on the premiere of from high in the flies (despite his vertigo); Joe Aveline, Technical Manager at the National, who remembers Olivier giving a highly-strung Ingmar Bergman short shrift; actor Thelma Barlow falling over a sheep while playing in regional Rep.

One of the difficulties we found when structuring the exhibiton was where to put Pinter. In many ways sui generis, and deserving of his own section; and yet so thoroughly implicated in all aspects of post-War theatre as actor, designer, director…and writer. In the end, as with Olivier, we found he made appearances everywhere. A special case marks the opening of The Homecoming –and includes letters of congratulation from Beckett and Coward- but Pinter also appears in a section celebrating regional rep. This section shows how many playwrights who developed their talent while acting in rep – Pinter, as well as Peter Nichols, John Osborne, and Charles Wood - would equally find their writing careers boosted by early recognition from regional audiences and reviewers. A photo of Pinter as the eponymous Uninvited Guest in rep at Colchester in 1955 is exhibited alongside an image of a theatre programme featuring one ‘David Baron’, a letter in which Pinter sends news from the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, to Joe Brearley, and  Pinter's first scrapbook in which he pasted reviews of The Room- performed over two nights in a disused squash court in Bristol, the local Bristol Evening Post rather presciently noting that ‘Mr Pinter may well make some impact as a dramatist' (see image).

It’s open until 30 November 2008, and  has got good coverage so far- from Pink News to the Telegraph, and lots in between, including an interesting piece in the Guardian .

Simon Gray & Terence Rigby

I was saddened to hear of the deaths of the playwright Simon Gray last week, and the actor Terence Rigby this week. Both men had strong connections to Harold Pinter through their respective crafts and this is reflected by their presence in his archive.

Pinter directed many of Gray’s plays including Otherwise Engaged, The Rear Column, Close of Play, Quartermaine’s Terms, The Common Pursuit, Life Support, The Late Middle Classes, The Old Masters and Butley (the play and the film). There are sections relating to each of these plays within the professional correspondence series of the Harold Pinter archive. There is also a section of letters in the personal correspondence series between Gray and Pinter where they discuss these collaborative projects, other productions of their plays and personal matters. In addition to the letters, the archive holds some photographs of Pinter directing Alan Bates in the 1974 film version of Butley (album 4).

Terence Rigby was an actor who appeared in many Pinter plays, including the 1965 premiere of The Homecoming and the 1975 premiere of No Man’s Land. The photo albums have colour images of Rigby in the New York productions of these plays (Weissberger album) and some black and white shots of the London production of No Man’s Land (album 4). There are also several letters from Rigby to be found in the archive, in one he discusses his upcoming role in a 2003 production of The Caretaker, writing ‘on first reading yesterday the prospect appears an extremely formidable task - extremely’. In addition to this, Terence Rigby gave an interview for the theatre archive project where he talks about his experiences as an actor.

Dear Harold Pinter...

This week I’m still making my way through Harold Pinter’s correspondence files and I think I will be for the foreseeable future. I’ve been working through the files that have been vaguely labelled ‘arts’. The majority of letters in these files are from organisations inviting Pinter to participate in events, give lectures or join societies. There are also many letters from universities bestowing honorary degrees (nine at the last count) and organisations awarding prizes (including the Companion of Honour, Prix Europe pour le Théâtre, Brianza Prize, Laurence Olivier Award, Molière Award, David Cohen Award, Ennio Flaiano Award and the Shakespeare Prize). The correspondence relating to Pinter’s Nobel Prize for Literature is in separate files and will be catalogued in a few weeks time.

I came across a few more famous names this week, although sadly they weren’t quite as they first appeared. Initially, I was very excited to read a letter from a Mr Tom Cruise, however, I soon realised his address was more Cricklewood than Hollywood and that he probably wasn’t the international mega-star. There were also a few letters from Peggy Butcher, but as she’s a fictional character in a popular soap, I’m assuming it’s not the Peggy Butcher, although you never know...

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.