On the 10th October, 1930 the esteemed English playwright, screenwriter, director, actor and Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter was born. He was the only son of an East-End Jewish tailor. He was a thoughtful and bookish child, who later excelled as a scholar, cricketer and athlete at Hackney Downs Grammar School. His English teacher, Joseph Brearley recognised his aptitude for drama and poetry and encouraged him to write and to act. Brearley became a prominent and influential figure, and an important mentor who helped to shape his future career.
He was awarded a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but his attendance was poor and erratic. He was distracted and alarmed by the political situation that was gradually unfolding. The country was ostensibly at peace, but he could still sense a creeping authoritarianism and militarism. He was a conscientious objector and he was fined several times for refusing national service.
He continued his studies at the Central School of Speech and Drama and acted in repertory theatre productions across England and Ireland. His acting work enabled him to think much more profoundly about the art and craft involved in the construction and performance of plays.
In 1951 he performed in a series of Shakespeare productions staged in theatres across the Republic of Ireland. Here he met another important figure and mentor who helped to mould his literary imagination. Anew “Mac” McMaster was an Irish Shakespearean actor-manager whose expertise left an indelible impression upon the young and budding actor/dramatist.
He described the collaboration with Mac as “electric”, and it inspired Pinter to write his own unique tribute to the Bard, in an essay entitled “A Note to Shakespeare”. He argued that the plays were a precious and delicate resource and must be approached in the same way that a doctor or a surgeon treats his or her patient, “The mistake (the actors) make, most of them, is to attempt to determine and calculate, with the finest instruments, the source of the wound”. He explains that this initial approach can be ham-fisted and crude to the point of bluntness.
However even though the actor-practitioner fully understands the dilemma, he concludes through years and years of striving in the roles that any remedy is futile, “They turn to the wound with deference, a lance, and a needle and thread. At the entrance of the lance the gap widens. At the use of needle and thread the wound coagulates and atrophies in their hands. Shakespeare writes of the open wound and, through him, we know it open and know it closed.” This is a vivid and striking analogy, which he pursues with alacrity and vigour.
He observes that the stage is the operating theatre, or the medical clinic, where all the hopeless cases are brought forward for examinations. However everyone who participates in these examinations becomes resigned to the fact that the suffering will never actually end, only perpetuated. The desperation is detailed in unsparing prose, “one discovers a long corridor of postures, fluid and hardened at the quick, gross and godlike, putrescent and copulative; raddled; attentive, crippled and gargantuan; crumbling with the dropsy; heavy with elephantiasis, broody with government; severe; fanatical; paralytic; voluptuous; impassive; muscle-bound; lissom; virginal; unwashed; bewildered; humpbacked; icy and statuesque. All are contained in the wound which Shakespeare does not attempt to sew up or reshape, whose pain he does not attempt to eradicate. He amputates, deadens, aggravates at will..” Evidently Pinter developed a great insight into the humanity that imbues the canon, all facets of the human experience are reflected back at the audience, even the ugliest elements that are seemingly beyond hope.
He concludes his essay in stark, unforgiving and unequivocal tones that ultimately “The fabric never breaks. The wound is open. The wound is people’d”. The gallery of pitiless human grotesques infused and informed his perspective. It was this tireless dedication to Shakespeare and his philosophy which allowed him to create his own characters for the stage. He drew on themes of isolation, alienation and terror. Every character appears disconnected and disturbed, detached from reality. This was deliberate, it was actually summoned from real childhood memories.
Pinter was evacuated from London when he was barely ten years old. It was at the peak of the Blitz, and he endured a prolonged period of isolation, dissociation and dislocation. He was forever haunted by the memory of that time. In 1957, it was fortuitous and fortunate that he reconnected with his old school friend, Henry Woolf. Woolf was another protege of Joseph Brearley and played in the same cricket team at Hackney Downs. Woolf was in the final year of a directing course at the University of Bristol and he asked Pinter if he could write a play for him.
He obliged and wrote “The Room”. Woolf directed the play and played the main character Mr Kidd at his graduation ceremony. It was a one act play featuring a cast of eccentric outsiders with no obvious connection with each other. Pinter was unorthodox for the time, and the play deliberately subverted all of the conventions of polite drawing room dramas. The dialogue was punctuated with uneasy silences, unsettling the audience.
In that same year he wrote “The Birthday Party” and the play premiered at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge in April 1958. This play was written in the same style, with similar characters and the first set of audiences were totally unprepared, and somewhat bewildered by it. His career as a playwright would have sunk without trace if it had not been for the encouraging words of the theatre critic Harold Hobson, who immediately understood the motivations behind the piece. His review was called “The Screw Turns Again” and it was published in The Sunday Times.
The article ultimately salvaged Pinter’s reputation, and career. However he was frequently subject to vicious criticism throughout the fifties, sixties and beyond. Most of the criticism was undeserved, and merely a spiteful reflection of a shallow culture that regards artists and writers with contempt.
It is a uniquely British trait to mock and belittle anyone who dares to express themselves, it ultimately stems from a sense of envy and fragility. Anyone who tries to be creative or thoughtful is considered pretentious or pompous, and their earnestness is never admired, instead it is looked on with suspicion.
The sixties became the pinnacle of Pinter’s career, but this did not stop the attacks from the media. Unfairly his plays were castigated and maligned by the press as “absolute drivel and incomprehensible nonsense”. These angry missives sound rather too familiar, and resemble the hollow insults meted out today on social media.
However Pinter remained undeterred. In the face of continuing criticism he kept returning to the fond memories at Hackney Downs with Joseph Brearley and the extended walks that they took through the park, where they discussed and debated drama and poetry in long and animated exchanges. Hackney was the epicentre of his world, it is where he observed society changing, much of it for the worse. In spite of the peace and harmony promised by a succession of post-war governments, the reality was stark. Utopia never materialised. The landscape was desecrated, the people were left battle scarred, angry and resentful. The promise was never fulfilled, and everyone was broken.
Nothing of any value or worth remained, functionality and utility were poor and pitiful substitutes for the sacred and the beautiful. Ugliness resounded, in the brutalist architecture, and deep within the layers of the industrial military complex. The country was rendered a machine and run for the benefit of the faceless bureaucrats. They created the modern world in their own image, a black and soulless void. A country without a soul will only engender degradation and chaos. Pinter’s lonely, alienated, atomised characters are not far fetched, they are visible and all around us. We must remember his prophetic voice.
