Pinter, Harold

playwright, screenwriter, director and actor

(Vidéo) [ENG] Harold Pinter - Interview (Charlie Rose)

Artesquieu · May 4, 2021 · partial coverage

• Harold Pinter
• Lincoln Center Festival
• The Room
• Betrayal
• The Homecoming
• Celebration
• intuition
• language
• political commitment
• NATO
• Kosovo
• Pinochet
• Charlie Rose

Coverage note: full (YouTube auto-generated captions without punctuation, with several recognition errors)

Core ideas

A career seen as a whole. The festival presents nine of his 29 plays and eight films, a retrospective that Pinter finds "gratifying" and "very demanding". He says he was a writer and poet at twelve, acted at school from sixteen (Macbeth, Romeo), earned his living as an actor from nineteen, and only started writing plays in the mid-1950s. The programme runs from his first play, The Room (Bristol, 1957, directed by his old friend Henry Wolf, who acts in it again), to his latest, Celebration, forty-three years later. He says looking at the whole body of work gives him no new insight into it; he has no time to be analytical, and only knows that he wrote it.

How a play happens. He never plans a play: an image arrives and "the next thing happens". The Room came from an image seen at a party at about twenty-five, of a man fluttering around barefoot serving bacon and eggs to a huge silent man reading a comic; when Wolf asked for a play he wrote it in four days, changing the fluttering man into a woman. He writes a complete first draft, then reworks it at length, but the "gist" is already the play; the process is intuitive, to the point that he did not remember writing some lines of A Kind of Alaska when he heard them years later. Betrayal is his play closest to his own life: a seven-year affair in the 1960s, then the discovery that the woman's husband had known for a couple of years and had never said so, so that "everyone was betraying everyone else". One for the Road was written in anger and was a catharsis; he likes The Homecoming for its shape and authority; Celebration, set in a restaurant, surprised him most, the "funniest play" he has written. His lodestar is language: he says he has always been in love with English and the rhythm of speech, and that one's obligation is to capture speech accurately.

Scrutiny, politics and the limits of theatre. He presents scrutiny of "the body politic" as a duty for every citizen, and says people are too often "bewildered and resigned" to what governments do in their name. He doubts that theatre, "a comparatively small area", is the best place, but believes art can "go into people's unconsciousness" (he cites Arthur Miller and Brecht); his own political activity is letters to the press, signatures and public speeches, including television. He tells how, on a British television programme about Pinochet, he challenged Lord Lamont's claim that Allende was "exactly the same", and stresses how a false statement can lodge in viewers' minds. He would never join a party and prefers to be "an independent political intelligence".

The confrontation with Rose. Asked for the worst examples, Pinter names the subservience of British governments to American ones, and calls the NATO bombing of Serbia (including the marketplace in Niš and the Belgrade television studio) a "criminal act", rejects "humanitarian intervention" as "ludicrous", says the Gulf War left no room for diplomacy and that sanctions kill children, and says Milosevic, Clinton and Blair should all be in the dock at The Hague. Rose objects that Saddam Hussein could end the sanctions, that the Kosovars and Bosnians saw NATO as saviours, and that Pinter makes no distinctions of motive or degree between acts. Pinter replies that "our memories are very short", pointing to US responsibility in El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia and East Timor, and to American prison practices (stun belts, restraint chairs). Rose ends by defending American "exceptionalism" and the democratic experiment, while conceding the oddity of the last election; the two agree to continue the debate.

Excerpts