Maybe you like theatre, maybe you like Harold Pinter, maybe you just have eyes – however you’ve done it, you’ve probably realised that Oxford drama is positively Pinterrific this term. But slow down – do you actually know anything about Harold Pinter, the man behind Michaelmas’ five-star smash The Birthday Party, the upcoming Hothouse, and Celebration?
Hackney-born Harold Pinter won a multitude of awards, one of which was the Nobel Prize, which he is reputed to have won without even trying. However, he is best known for ‘doing the pauses’ and having extramarital sex. Before he died he enjoyed cricket. Mainly we remember him for doing the pauses.Still, it’s all very well us sitting here in Oxford, smoking cheroots and fondling each other – what do the Great British Public think of this hesitant award-encrusted adulterer? I was keen to find out and conducted some social science by asking the opinions of four elderly people on a train. It was clear that they were impressively familiar with his oeuvre. But old people love the theatre and would still love it if it coughed heavily in their face, so they’re not great indicators of public mood. What could be behind this small-scale Pinter revival? Clearly something in his work has been identified as relevant and timely. Sure, he’s always there, cruising the peripheries of our collective unconscious, but so are Bombay Mix and Lara Croft, and thrusting young creatives aren’t suddenly demanding the rights to those. It is as though all the elements – earth, air, water, pollen – have combined to make us insatiable. Take my hand and let us go deeper into Pintception.
In 2007, Michael Billington identified a wave of national Pintermania as the alignment of ‘political vision’ between playwright and audience, and that’s probably what’s going on here. In a climate of upheaval these plays feel like they were written for the occasion. The three mentioned above are, in one way or another, difficult births under strained circumstances: the literal birth that kickstarts The Hothouse, a product of rape in a hospital of sanitised bureaucratic efficiency; The Birthday Party’s mental wrench of interrogation, collapse and regression that winks at genesis in its title, and Celebration, Pinter’s last play and perhaps most effective in distilling these ideas. Its posh restaurant is hermetically sealed perfection, a womb to the unhinged waiting staff and a temporary respite from consuming, bickering, and screwing.
Pinter’s friend and collaborator Henry Woolf remarked that rooms in his work were like the mind, places ‘where all the real stuff goes on’ – the spectacle here is essentially two lots of empty-headed materialists pouring wallpaper patterns and booze into their skull cavities to hold off ‘killing everyone in sight.’ It ends uncertainly and fittingly. We’re not sure if we’ll ever ‘get right out of it’, of the bedlam that awaits us when we kick-bollock-scramble out of our uteruses. Only that we should want to.
Seasonal Suicide Notes by Roger Lewis describes an occasion on which a dining Pinter shouted “What a stupid fucking question!” when asked if he’d prefer sparkling water or still water. He comes off as an arsehole. I reckon he was just inducing labour.
