Listening to Pinter…
Friday, December 26th, 2008The theatre world is still digesting the news of Harold Pinter’s death on Christmas Eve. A great, great loss. In latestNEWS, you’ll find a clutch of links to news items and obituaries. Best thing to do, though, I think, is to listen to the man himself, recorded at the British Library shortly after the death of Simon Gray, on 8 Sept 2008. In the discussion with Harry Burton, he gives a wide-ranging account of his career - and is on great anecdotal form, talking about his time with Donald Wolfit, his affection for Gray - and concedes that he probably did tell Alan Ayckbourn off during rehearsals for the Scarborough run of The Birthday Party with the line ‘Mind your bloody business - just say the lines.’ ‘They don’t make them like that anymore,’ he says talking about the generation of actors he encountered in the 50s - one might add, assessing Pinter’s immense contribution to British theatre - they don’t make them like him anymore.Â
You can visit the podcast at http://www.bl.uk/podcast. Or click this link - . More material at www.haroldpinter.org.Â
January 2nd, 2009 at 6:05 pm
It seems to me that like the young Noel Coward, the young Harold Pinter was a fantastic listener. Both of them wrote a series of early plays that showed an acute ear for how people actually talked. Pinter was hanging around buses and cafes in Hackney with his notebook when his contemporaries were locked away in university lecture halls and libraries. When Pinter became successful, he inevitably spent less time listening to people, just like Coward. That’s why I prefer their early works to what they wrote in middle age.