GUEST VOCALS: Mark Brown on Pinter
Harold Pinter - supreme playwright, dissident poet, turbulent radical, Nobel laureate - died on Christmas Eve. He had always had a remarkable sense of timing. As those of us who revered him learned the news the following day, how many pondered whether the old man had chosen to leave us with a resonating, final Christmas Day message? How many thought, as I did, simply "bugger!"?
Pinter had a disastrous start as a playwright. The London critics, almost every one, savaged his first professionally staged play, The Birthday Party, in 1958. Only the legendary Harold Hobson (critic of The Sunday Times) understood the genius of this disquieting, sinister and darkly hilarious play set in an English seaside guesthouse.
Although, briefly, discouraged by this setback, Pinter emerged as a colossus in world theatre. With such dramas as The Caretaker, The Homecoming and One For The Road, Pinter gave us a theatre that sparked with disturbing intelligence, theatrical ingenuity, searing wit and a profound, complex humanism.
It was my honour and privilege to have spent time in discussion with Pinter. The 9/11 attacks coincided with the news that Pinter was to direct, for the National Theatre in London, a touring production of his own great 1975 play No Man's Land. I wrote to him immediately, requesting an interview.
To my great surprise, and enduring gratitude, he agreed. The interview - which ranged from his insistence that the US's forthcoming invasion of Afghanistan would only "f*** up" that wretched country even more, to his admiration of Scottish playwright Gregory Burke's political comedy Gagarin Way, to his pleasure in "rediscovering" No Man's Land - was conducted, as, his interviews always were, over a glass of excellent white wine. It went splendidly.
Pinter and I remained in contact on occasion in the years that followed. On each occasion, he exhibited the almost casual intelligence and generosity that were, according to his friends, the hallmarks of the man.
The great blessing for contemporary theatre audiences is that we are on the receiving end of Pinter's remarkable theatrical output. I remember my seven-year-old daughter picking up my copy of Ian Smith's book Pinter In The Theatre, which appears to depict the playwright in the midst of directing a play. "That man looks like he's doing magic," she said. She was right, of course, he was.
