The great and the good of British theatre turned out en masse on June 7 to pay tribute to Harold Pinter at the Olivier Theatre. The celebration, directed by Ian Rickson, and starring, among others, Lindsay Duncan, Jude Law, Gina McKee, Sam West and Penelope Wilton, was something truly memorable – and I’m sure that Pinter would have approved.
Having Kenneth Cranham revisit his role in The Birthday Party two decades after he played Stanley alongside Pinter as Goldberg in the 1986 television adaptation and casting Colin Firth in the part of the old man from The Caretaker was inspired, and demonstrated the timelessness of Pinter’s characters. But as well as the friends and actors he worked with, students from LAMDA joined the 24-strong cast and read from the playwright’s 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
Interspersed with extracts from the plays were Pinter’s musings on cricket. The love poems dedicated to his wife, the author Antonia Fraser, were perfectly balanced by the political and those that rage against the war in Iraq and the failings of the former US government. It proved something that I had long suspected: Pinter’s poems are supremely theatrical. Although much of his poetry has been lambasted for being excessive, or dismissed as political rants, the night demonstrated that off the page and in the hands of an expert actor, Pinter’s poetry takes flight.
Just the first few lines of Death, read by Stephen Rea, that opened the proceedings, sent a shiver down my spine:
Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?
I loved the pairing of Sheila Hancock and Eileen Atkins as two old women sharing a bowl of soup from The Black and White (1959) and Michael Sheen and Janie Dee in The Betrayal were also superb. But the highlight of the evening was Douglas Hodge reading from Mac – about Pinter’s early experiences with Anew McMaster, the last of the great actor-managers. When Hodge concluded the piece with: “We who worked with him were the luckiest people in the world and loved him”, you could hear members of the audience sigh in recognition that the very same could be said of Pinter. Actors loved him and they loved his plays.
Pinter famously let his characters speak for him (he hated, and indeed refused, to “explain” his plays). I think he would have enjoyed the evening and been pleased with the choice of extracts and the balance struck between his plays, his musings and his poetry.
In the world of literature, when your collected works are celebrated in one publication, you know that you have really made it. It seems a pity that this retrospective of Pinter’s work, with some of the finest British actors employed to pay tribute to the playwright, should come after his death. I wonder if the acting fraternity could be prevailed upon, once a year say, to pay tribute in this way to other theatre greats while they are still alive; so that they too can enjoy and bask in a celebration of their life and career.
Lucy Popescu
