Harold Pinter Archive Blog

Peggy and the WAGS

Peggy did not always get on well with writers’ wives. As Colin Chambers remarks in his biography, Peggy believed that it was the duty of writers’ wives to put their husbands’ talent before their own needs. She corresponded with quite a few of the wives and girlfriends (and gay lovers – in Kenneth Halliwell’s case). Sometimes this correspondence was strictly focused on her clients’ writing, but with others she provided emotional support and professional advice.

 

Surviving letters in the archive show professional relationships with Edward Bond’s wife Elisabeth and John Arden’s wife Margaretta D’Arcy. Several other wives are also mentioned in a professional capacity: Sandra Rudkin as script editor for BBC Birmingham and Robin Chapman’s wife Boo as a translator.

 

A letter to Jo Bolt, on the breakdown of her marriage to Robert Bolt, shows a more compassionate side to Peggy. Peggy had also known the Bolts’ children and had had their daughter to stay for a weekend. When Bolt remarried, Peggy went out of her way to further the career of second wife, actor Sarah Miles. She did however warn Bolt that his insistence on writing a part for his wife into his own screenwriting contracts would look as if Miles couldn’t get by on her own talent. By helping out her clients’ partners, Peggy undoubtedly had half an eye to how this would benefit her writers and their output. It would be unfair though, in my opinion, to suggest that this was her only motive. Her letters to women do convey warmth and empathy, even if they don’t reach the fervid pitch of her correspondence with male clients!

Not just a playwrights' agent

The archive reflects writers’ work for television, radio and film as well as the stage. Peggy Ramsay also dealt with stage and screen rights for novelists Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and Jean Rhys.

Peggy did not confine herself to representing writers. Her client list also includes director Lindsay Anderson, designers Tim O’Brien, Tazeena Firth, Alan Tagg, Robert Harris, Reece Pemberton and John Byrne and composers Carl Davis, Ron Grainer and Nick Bicat.

Download Peggy Ramsay client list

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.

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.

Harold Pinter's snaps

This week I have had the pleasure of leafing through Harold Pinter’s photographs. Sadly, there are no holiday snaps to be found in the albums, but there are lots of other interesting photos. Some of the many highlights include a couple of photos of Pinter as an 18 year old in a school production of Romeo and Juliet, playing the title role; a rare shot of Pinter in his repertory days, playing the uninvited guest in The Uninvited Guest in Colchester, 1955; and colour photographs of Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud in No Man’s Land in 1976. There are also some very familiar faces in the albums – John Hurt as a sprightly 23 year old in the first stage presentation of The Dwarfs in 1963; Judi Dench in the 1982 premiere of A Kind of Alaska; Bill Nighy in a 1991 production of Betrayal at the Almeida; and Pete Postlethwaite in The Homecoming at the Manchester Royal Exchange in 2002.

The fifteen albums contain photographs of stage, television, film and radio productions of Pinter’s plays from the UK and further afield. They also include images of Pinter in action both as director and actor and stills from some of the films he adapted. True to form, there is an index accompanying the albums so it’s easy to identify which performances are included in which album.

Above, photograph of ‘The Birthday Party’, Israel, 1965 (Album 2).

Pinter's Scrapbooks

I have started the cataloguing of Harold Pinter’s UK and international production scrapbooks this week. The scrapbooks include newspaper cuttings of reviews, copies of articles, production programmes, posters and some photographs. They provide a comprehensive record of how Pinter’s plays, films and directorial offerings were critically received. I was assured by Mr Pinter himself that he had personally compiled the earliest scrapbooks, and the handwriting in the first three volumes seems to confirm this. I can just imagine him at his desk meticulously cutting and pasting (the old fashioned way) into the books.

The scrapbooks are in very good order and do not require any physical rearrangement, which is nice. There are also indexes to most of the volumes that describe what is held in each, with dates. So what have I actually been doing you wonder? Well, I’ve been working through each scrapbook double-checking dates and noting the different languages present. The range of languages I’ve been identifying is testament to the far reach of Pinter’s work, including not only our nearest European neighbours (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch) but also the Scandinavian countries, Turkish, Japanese, Hebrew and Icelandic to name a few!

The scrapbooks series also includes volumes relating to the arts world in general, poetry, political activities and personal matters, which will all be tackled next week.

Lights, camera, action!

This week has seen the cataloguing of the film correspondence files. The letters mostly relate to Harold Pinter’s adaptations to film of other people’s work, although some cover Pinter’s acting roles on the silver screen. Letters about his own plays that have been produced as films are filed with the series of correspondence that relates to the ‘arts world’. In addition to the films that have been produced, the correspondence covers films that have never been made, such as ‘The Tragedy of King Lear’, ‘The Dreaming Child’, ‘Proust’ and ‘Victory’. It also covers those films that Pinter wrote a screenplay for, but which, for various reasons, the final version used was not his. These films include ‘Lolita’ and ‘The Remains of the Day’.

The letters come from a wide range of luminaries of movie land. Represented in the correspondence are actors including Al Pacino, Laurence Olivier, Meryl Streep, John Cleese and Lauren Bacall (who signs as her real name, Betty) and directors including Stanley Kubrick, Karel Reisz, John Schlesinger, Adrian Lyne and James Ivory. There are also several letters from the authors of the novels that Pinter is adapting, including LP Hartley (‘The Go-Between), John Fowles (‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’), Margaret Atwood (‘The Handmaid’s Tale’) and  Ian McEwan (‘The Comfort of Strangers’). Atwood expresses how pleased she is that Pinter is tackling her novel, writing ‘it is exactly right. If anyone can solve the problem of translation to screen it is you’ and McEwan writes of how he felt after seeing the finished film, ‘I liked the script, but I wanted to say that seeing the script performed, fulfilled, made me like it even more’.