PINTER AT THE BBC
www.bbc.co.uk/pinter
MICHAEL BILLINGTON Q&A
Harold Pinter's biographer Michael Billington answered your questions about the playwright on
Wednesday 6 November 2002.
He said: "I thought the questions were extraordinarily stimulating and amazingly varied. It just
shows how much informed debate, discussion and enquiry there is about Pinter out there in the
world at large."
INDIVIDUAL PLAYS
Ursula Bingham, Sittingbourne, Kent
Which of Pinter's works do you consider to be the worst and which to be the best and why?
Michael Billington
The best for me is The Homecoming in 1965, simply because it covers so much. The family as a
jungle, sexual tension, the idea that we never fully disclose ourselves to other people. It’s rich in
themes and I’ve seen it played many times and it always delights. It’s barbaric and it’s comic, and
it’s tragic and it’s brilliant.
The least good Pinter play is called Silence, which is part of a double bill called Landscape and
Silence and was staged in 1968. In Silence three characters sit in chairs on a stage and what you
get are three inter-related monologues though the characters never address each other. At the
time it seemed rather arch and undramatic and it’s almost never been revived to my knowledge.
Maybe if someone were to do it again we might discover hidden virtues, but it did seem to me as
Pinter at his most obscure and most unapproachable. So Silence for me remains the one to be
explored…
Ian Brown, Wales
Was the character of The Caretaker based on someone of whom Pinter had personal
experience?
Michael Billington
Davies was based on a tramp who was brought back to the house on Chiswick High Road where
Pinter was living in the 1950s. Pinter always claims he didn’t get to know this tramp particularly
well - he would meet him on the stairs and they’d exchange a few words. When the tramp had
been thrown out of the house he bumped into him and I think Pinter gave him a bob or two a few
weeks later to help him on his way. But it was the strange mixture of loneliness and aggression
that made up his character that Pinter saw as dramatically profitable.
John Gardner, Cheshire
Many critics of Pinter's more recent works such as Moonlight and Ashes to Ashes have found
them to exhibit something of a decline in his dramatic skill. I see them more as a development.
What is your view?
Michael Billington
I agree with you. Obviously the later plays are much shorter, more compressed, much tighter.
They don’t have the symphonic structure of plays like The Caretaker or The Homecoming, but I
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think they are very powerful. I would single out Ashes to Ashes which features only two
characters in a room who barely move. And yet although the play starts with domestic tension
between the man and the woman, it actually opens up to emit torture, persecution and images of
the Holocaust.
What I think Pinter is doing in these later plays is trying to deal with the political history of the last
few decades in a very compact and compressed form. I think he’s trying to find images that carry
resonance, particularly in countries that have lived through torture and tyranny. Again, a play like
One for the Road runs for about 25 minutes, it has no more than a handful of characters, it
consists of simply an interrogator greeting his victims. And yet whenever that play is done in a
country that’s lived through some kind of authoritarianism it causes immense resonance. I think
it’s a very narrow, parochial and often very British view that Pinter somehow declined in the
1980s when he ceased to write these plays about domestic tension and wrote short cryptic plays
about political reality. I think the later plays are hugely significant and dramatically exciting.
Ainslie Simmons, London
I'm a great fan of Pinter's more recent work - particularly his stark, brutal and highly politicised
works in the 80s - but why do you think these are still overshadowed, in the public's appreciation
by The Caretaker, The Birthday Party etc?
Michael Billington
These plays are overshadowed in the public understanding, in Britain. Here he’s obviously much
better known as the writer of The Caretaker and The Birthday Party than he is the writer of Party
Time or Moonlight or Ashes to Ashes. What is fascinating is how the later plays have huge
currency abroad and particularly in countries that have emerged from some form of either
communist or fascist tyranny, you’ll find Pinter’s political plays are being done time and again.
They understand One for the Road in Spain or in Russia extremely clearly in a way that I don’t
believe we do in Britain because we have had the comparative luxury of a democratic system,
though Pinter himself might dispute that. I think these later works will come into their own with
time. Don’t forget the later works are also often of a slightly awkward length for conventional
commercial management and that’s why I think it’s important these plays are done as often as
possible on television where I also think they often achieve their maximum effect.
Ian Barrett, Oxford
How do you feel the play based on Oliver Sacks' Awakenings, A Kind of Alaska, fits in with the
rest of the Pinter canon?
Michael Billington
A Kind of Alaska is unusual because it’s the only major play in the Pinter canon that is drawn from
an existing source. A strange fact there, all Pinter’s plays really come from his imagination, all
Pinter’s film-scripts are based on existing books and he makes that distinction himself. A Kind of
Alaska comes from Awakenings, is based on a very specific case in that book and yet what is
curious is that although Pinter is dealing with medical reality he makes the subject very much his
own. As you know, in the play a woman wakes after a prolonged period of sleeping sickness and
it’s about her bewildered reaction to the world around her and about the fact that all her memories
are based on her childhood. Although Pinter is transcribing Sack’s medical account he makes the
material his own and allows it to chime in with his own obsessions - with the nature of memory,
with our own strange reaction to the world around us. Sacks himself commented on the fact that
when he first read the play and was sent Pinter’s manuscript he thought it wasn’t in anyway alien
but something that accorded with his own experiences. It’s a perfect choice of material for a writer
like Pinter who is concerned with the alien nature of human experience and with the pervasive
power of memory.
Rita Sedani, Waltham Abbey
I was first introduced to Pinter's works three years ago, during my A-levels. As a result I am now
very interested in Pinter's works. One of the features of his plays are power struggles. In your
opinion which character would you say "won" in The Homecoming and were Teddy and Ruth's
lives in America actual fact or a figment of their imagination?
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Michael Billington
Pinter’s plays are about power struggles. My interpretation of The Homecoming is that Ruth does
win and you can deduce that from the fact that at the end of the play she’s occupying the central
chair which at the beginning of the play was occupied by Max, then the head of the household. At
the end of the play Ruth is in the chair, Max is a sad old man slobbering at her feet begging for a
kiss. One of Max’s sons has his head resting in Ruth’s lap and the other son, Lenny, who wanted
to control her apparently impotent and unable to control her. So it seems to me that Ruth has
walked into this household, this appalling male atmosphere and taken it over and, I think,
endowed it with the female principle. That is only my view but it seems to me game, set and
match to Ruth. As for Ruth’s life in America, I believe you have to treat it as fact. The images that
Pinter uses to convey this are to do with aridity, sterility and comfort and what he’s implying is that
Ruth has willingly sacrificed the glamour of American academic life and its emptiness for the
rough vitality of an East End in which she grew up.
Alexander Leach, Muswell Hill, North London
Who is your favourite character from a Pinter play and why?
Michael Billington
Max in The Homecoming because you see so many aspects of him. At the start of the play he’s
loud, blustering, bullying, “Has anybody seen the scissors?” he cries. As the play goes on you
realise behind this façade of domination is a man who’s anxious, old, fearful. He’s losing his
status in the household because of the power of his sons. He’s aware that his wife betrayed him
with his best friend MacGregor and he gets curiously excited by the arrival of his unexpected
daughter-in-law, Ruth. At the end he’s slavishly dependent upon her favours. Many of these I
hasten to add are not admirable qualities! Max has linguistic vitality and an extraordinary range of
emotions and any man who starts as a domineering patriarch and ends as a very sad old man
must remind you of King Lear. In the recent revival of the play Ian Holm played Max, having
played King Lear and the parallels between the two characters suddenly became blindingly
obvious.
BILLINGTON'S BIOGRAPHY
Gavin Stewart, Scotland
Did you not find it a truly awesome task, trying not only to fully understand a dramatist and man
like Pinter but also to articulate and express his dramatic vision?
Michael Billington
It was awesome. I would never claim to have provided the definitive answer but if I got close to
Pinter it was because of his generosity in opening himself up to me. The great thing was I was
free to ask him virtually any question I wanted to about the work and its origins and how these
plays developed in his imagination. The clue he gave me or what I deduced was that these works
nearly all began from some personal or autobiographical experience and time and again I was
struck by the fact that these plays had an origin in Pinter’s own experience or the experiences of
friends. These were not abstract works of art, they were not theoretical works, they were based
on practical human experience.
Lucian Randall, London
I thought your biography of Pinter was so good. A real landmark. What's surprising for someone
familiar with Pinter's work is that for years nobody got anything out of him by way of
accompaniment apart from the famous "weasel under the cocktail cabinet" comment. I can
understand that he might want to be involved with a biography at this stage in his life, but there
does seem to a be a 'new' Pinter in evidence over the last few years and I wondered what made
him open up to such a degree.
Michael Billington
Thank you for your kind remarks. Quite simply the book happened because I got a letter from a
publisher saying that Harold Pinter would welcome a short book on his politics and was I
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interested in writing it. Out of that came a much larger and total biography. It’s difficult to know
why Pinter chose this moment in the 1990s to open up. I think it’s because he felt his political
ideas were being misinterpreted and misunderstood, particularly in the newspapers at the time,
and I think he felt The Guardian and myself were more likely to give him a fair hearing. I think he
just wanted to explain to someone what he was passionate about and angry about in the modern
world. After that, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, came the willingness to have his whole life
opened up to a biography. The only answer I can offer is that it was better done by someone who
liked his plays and was politically sympathetic than someone who wasn’t. But you’re right - in
recent years he’s become much more available, much more open, much more willing to discuss
the source of the plays. I think it’s because with age comes a degree of mellowing and a
recognition that Pinter would like the record to be set straight while he is still alive.
Matt Burns, Essex
In your opinion, what makes him "tick" and what was it that that actually drew you to his work?
Michael Billington
This is a very direct and a very difficult question. I think what makes him tick as a writer is his own
sense of the world as a strange and fearful place in which one never feels quite at home and in
which security, certainty and fixity are never absolute. In other words what makes Pinter tick as
an artist is the feeling that we all go through life feeling slightly provisional about ourselves, about
our status and about our relationship with our loved ones.
I also believe he is plagued and haunted by the notion of memory and by the idea that as we go
through daily life we are occupied by our memory of past events, past emotional circumstances
and these can break through at any moment. That we cannot control our memory, but that our
memory constantly inhabits us. To me, memory is almost the key to Pinter’s whole work as an
artist. If you go to the plays you will find the characters are always referring back to some past
time when they did feel a sense of vague certainty and in the present they are always floundering
and looking for some form of definition. That even applies, I think, to the later political plays like
One for the Road where the hero, although he is a figure of power in an authoritarian state, is
always referring back to some more golden past before the age of dissent.
As for what drew me to his work it was for precisely those qualities, but it was also his ability to
command a theatrical atmosphere. Pinter emerged in the late 1950s with a host of other very fine
writers like John Osborne and Joe Orton. I think that what made Pinter different was his
command of speech and gesture so that no moment in a Pinter play was ever without meaning or
significance and no word was spoken that didn’t have some bearing on the character and plot. In
a nutshell I think it’s his absolute dramatic economy which makes him a master.
Era Gjurgjeala, Kosova
What did Pinter have to say on your completion of the biography?
Michael Billington
I gave Pinter the draft version of the biography to read on a Friday afternoon at about 4pm. On
Sunday evening my phone rang and Pinter said he had read it. All he said was, “I’m not
embarrassed by it, but I have some questions I want to ask you”. All he objected to were
misstatements of fact. I did get the impression from Pinter that he thought I’d over stressed the
idea of his youth as a kind of golden age. Much of his writing is about trying to recapture the joys
and the memories of youth. I think Pinter believes I romanticised his growing up in Hackney. He
had a much more difficult and awkward time than I said. But he had the tact never to comment
directly on the book. He’s never said that he likes it, he’s never said that he dislikes it, he’s simply
said he wasn’t embarrassed by it – and coming from Pinter I took that to be high praise.
LIFE & WORK
Martyn Kerry, Ipswich
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Pinteresque is an adjective that has passed into common usage. Serious scholars of Kafka would
probably baulk at using the term Kafkaesque as the common perception of his work because it is
so far removed from the essence of the artist. Is Pinteresque similarly in danger of becoming an
irrelevant misnomer?
Michael Billington
I honestly think Pinteresque is one of those pieces of journalistic short hand which eventually will
become meaningless. The phrase was commonly used around the 60s and 70s to denote a
situation filled with unspecific menace and to refer to dialogue that was full of cryptic evasions. It’s
now applied as loosely as Kafkaesque is applied to Kafka and it’s lost its connection with reality.
You could argue that it is perversely flattering for a writer, in his own lifetime, to have achieved his
own adjective.
Sean Perrott, Woodford Green, Essex
Sitcoms, such as Steptoe and Son, Rising Damp and Hancock, seem to inhabit similar worlds
and share many characteristics of Pinter's work. Did he particularly admire any contemporary
working in this field, and was he ever commissioned, or have the desire, to write a sitcom?
Michael Billington
I don’t think Pinter ever wished to write a sitcom and to my knowledge he was never asked to. But
you’ve put your finger on a very interesting connection between what was happening in comedy
and what was happening in the theatre in the 50s and 60s. Don’t forget Pinter did write a lot of
review sketches, which have been revived recently and stand up extremely well. Pinter was part
of a movement that was redefining comedy and making it much more subversive and eccentric.
My own belief is that people like Galton and Simpson, who wrote Steptoe and Son and Hancock
were very much aware of what was happening in the theatre and were very conscious of the
Osborne/Pinter generation. I was recently listening to the famous Hancock programme on the
desolation of an English Sunday. I worked out that it was written not long after John Osborne
wrote Look Back in Anger, which is also about the boredom and desolation of an English Sunday.
And again Steptoe and Son with its anguished father/son relationship feeds off a lot of the
comedy at the time. I think there are all kinds of connections between Pinter and the comic writing
of that period and I think he was, in a sense, part of the general movement. I don’t think he ever
wanted to do sitcom itself because it would have been too restricting a format for him.
Katherine Healy, Northern Ireland
Is Harold Pinter left or right handed?
Michael Billington
Harold Pinter is right handed.
Patrick Hennessy, Hackney
When I was a kid in Worthing, I remember being told that the famous playwright Harold Pinter
was living for the summer in a terrace near the Connaught Theatre (we lived down the road so it
was very near). When I saw The Birthday Party many years later at the National I took one look
and thought "My God this is Worthing in the 1950s - and this is his reaction to it, a bit like John
Betjeman inviting friendly bombs to fall on Slough, a lot like mine to Worthing when I was a
teenager." So... did Pinter write The Birthday Party while spending the summer in Worthing?
Michael Billington
I think you can safely say Worthing had a big influence on The Birthday Party even if it wasn’t
actually written there. In fact I think the play is meant to evoke a whole range of those South
Coast seaside towns which Pinter had direct experience of.
The events that occur in The Birthday Party were actually inspired by something that happened in
Eastbourne when he found himself one Sunday evening without any digs. Someone in the pub
recommended a house to him and he stayed there a week. He found there was a reclusive lodger
who claimed to have once been a pianist and also a landlady who goosed the lodger every
morning at breakfast. There was an air of decadent seediness that found its way into the play.
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Your point is good because I think The Birthday Party is an indication of what English seaside
towns were like in the late 1950s. They were, on the one hand, areas of great respectability and
fake gentility and at the same time you always felt beneath them there was always something a
little shady, something a little shifty, something a little worrying and this was true.
Timothy, Chiswick
Where did Harold Pinter live in the Chiswick High Road when he started to write The Caretaker?
Michael Billington
Pinter wrote The Caretaker while living in a first floor flat in Chiswick High Road at number 373.
The events that happen in the play are a fairly close transcription of real events. Pinter and his
wife Vivien and their very young son Daniel were living in this very modest two room and there
was a kindly man who looked after the flat for his brother, in real life his name was Austin. One
day Austin brought a tramp he’d met in a café back to the house and the tramp stayed for two or
three weeks. Pinter knew the tramp very slightly and then one day he looked through an open
door and saw Austin with his back to the tramp gazing out into the garden and the tramp busy
putting stuff back into some kind of grubby hold-all, obviously being given his marching orders. All
this matters because it then becomes the bones of the plot of The Caretaker. The Caretaker is
not an absolute record of reality but it’s based on real events and very closely on that particular
part of West London.
Roberta Glynn, London
Pinter talks in a seemingly negative sense of his time spent living in Chiswick and Regents Park
with his first wife as a time of seclusion and isolation. In your opinion without this experience
would his representation of the individual as an outcast within today's society be less powerful?
Michael Billington
You’ve put your finger on an interesting paradox that writers often produce some of their most
vibrant work at a time of their lives when they are struggling, impoverished and even emotionally
unhappy. What staggers me is how fertile Pinter was in those years from 1958 to 1966/67. What
a great outrush of work there was in the theatre, the television and in cinema. If you look at
Pinter’s life in that period it starts with him living in a very mean and humble flat in Chiswick,
admittedly he then ends up in considerable comfort in Regents Park, but also that time’s one of
emotional unhappiness. I would suggest there is no automatic correlation between a writer’s
physical comfort and writing success. It is the difficult, tormented early years that often produce or
stimulate the work that defines the artist.
Philip Nash, Oxford
Do you feel that Harold Pinter's time in Ireland, acting in Anew McMaster's amateur travelling
company, has had any lasting effect on his own drama?
Michael Billington
Ireland has had an enormous influence on Pinter, firstly because he acted in McMaster's
company. He also discovered the writing of Samuel Beckett while working there and fell in love
really profoundly with a member of the company. I think it affected him artistically too. I think he
fell in love both with the countryside, with the idea of Ireland, with the scenery of Ireland and with
the language and texture of Ireland.
If you look at Pinter’s plays from The Birthday Party onwards there are constant references to
Ireland. In The Birthday Party one of the two gunmen who come to terrorise Stanley is Irish and
although he’s a sort of fractured and disturbed personality he has a nostalgic vision of Ireland.
The reference to Ireland goes through to old times and beyond and of course Pinter’s been
celebrated in Ireland through the festivals at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. His second wife Lady
Antonia Fraser has strong family connections with Ireland through the Longfords. So Pinter’s life
and work is saturated with Ireland and yes I think it has had an effect on his drama both in terms
of its texture and its structure.
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Edward Lewis, Hull
Where did Harold Pinter take his political interest from? Was it fuelled by any particular
individual?
Michael Billington
It’s a profound question. My understanding is that Pinter’s rage against injustice was bred in the
bone. Don’t forget his circumstances, he was part of an immigrant Jewish family living in the East
End in the 1930s and 1940s. Three of his four grandparents had been victims of pogroms in
Eastern Europe and had actually fled that part of the world because of persecution. So he was
brought up in a family context where brutality and torture were part of the pattern of life. Secondly
Pinter’s own awareness as a teenager of the injustice of life was very strong. He was born in
1930. As a teenager in the East End of London after World War II he and his friends were
appalled to discover that fascism, which we had fought to demolish, was still alive. It was perfectly
legal to have fascist newspapers, fascist meetings, fascist organisations in the East End of the
late 1940s because the Labour government believed that freedom of speech was important.
Pinter and his Jewish friends were appalled at the consequences of this and there are many
stories of them being harried and harassed, tormented by gangs of thugs in back streets and the
fights that took place. This bred in Pinter, I believe, a strong sense of the injustice of social
structures. He also had a built-in distrust of imposed authority and that manifested itself very
famously in his refusal to do National Service when summoned and his willingness to risk
imprisonment rather than face the consequences of that. So I think Pinter’s political instincts were
there from the start and I think they have become more articulate and more fierce as the years go
by, but they are not a recent acquisition. They were there partly through family circumstance and
partly through social environment.
Andrew Dawson, Oxfordshire
Do you think he would have given it all up to be England's greatest all rounder?
Michael Billington
I think Pinter would have sacrificed everything to be England’s greatest all rounder. You cannot
underestimate the power of cricket on Pinter’s imagination. It’s not just that he has every copy of
Wisden on his bookshelves. It’s not just that he used to go to private coaching sessions at Lord's
to make himself a better batsman. It is that he cares so much about cricket and you may know he
runs his own team The Gaieties. They even have a privately produced volume recording the team
history. Pinter selects the team, he manages the team, he doesn’t play now obviously but he still
supervises the team and it’s as if cricket becomes the focus for all his passion and enthusiasm
and woe betide The Gaities if they lose. So yes I think Pinter is proud of his literary achievement
but like many people who have accomplished things in literature and the arts it’s their athletic
prowess they secretly dream about. I think Pinter would rather have liked to walk down the steps
at Lord's and gone out and scored a century and then gone out again and taken eight wickets.
Stephen Fry
How much does Pinter owe Joseph Brearly?
Michael Billington
Pinter owes Joseph Brearly, a school master at Hackney Downs Grammar School, a fantastic
amount. Most people in later life who succeed in the arts will always acknowledge a dominant
teacher in their teens and for Pinter it was Joe Brearly. Brearly put on the school plays and cast
Pinter as Macbeth and Romeo. He would organise groups to go and see plays in London with
stars like Donald Wolfitt and a French production of The White Devil in 1947. But above all Joe
Brearly had a love of language that enthused and excited Pinter. Pinter himself recounted how he
and Joe Brearly would go striding through Victoria Park, in the East End of London, and Brearly
would chant lines, particularly from the Jacobean dramatists, particularly Webster whom Pinter
grew to love. So I think Pinter’s literary and linguistic inheritance owes a fantastic amount to
Brearly and he wouldn’t be the writer he is today without him.
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Lee Hill, London
Asides from Joseph Losey, which film director did Harold Pinter most enjoy collaborating with.
Alternatively, who was the worst?
Michael Billington
Aside from Losey Pinter’s had some good experiences with the cinema. I know he enjoyed
working with Jack Clayton on the Pumpkin Eater, with Karel Reisz on the French Lieutenant’s
Woman and Karel Reisz then went on to direct a lot of Pinter’s stage plays. David Jones has
become a friend who’s directed the film Betrayal, Langrishe Go Down and of Kafka’s The Trial.
Occasionally Pinter has had unhappy experiences in cinema and I think the worst was with a film
called The Last Tycoon, adapted from the novel by F Scott Fitzgerald. It may be part of the fault
of Pinter’s script which was not one of best. The casting was rather heavy and the direction was
by a man called Elia Kazan, one of the legends of Broadway and Hollywood in the post-war
world. I suppose his handling of the film itself was very laborious and very slow and he miscast
the female role. I think Pinter regards that as one of his unfortunate film experiences.
Vincent Egan, Glasgow
How does Harold Pinter reconcile the fact that he is hugely wealthy and a part of the arts
establishment with his radical beliefs?
Michael Billington
I wouldn’t say Pinter was hugely wealthy, although obviously he’s comfortable. I don’t think he
would see any contradiction here. His argument would be a writer is entitled to be rewarded for
the work he has done. It would be dishonest if he were not. Why should people produce his plays
all over the world and have people film his movie scripts without paying him the proper market
rate for the job?
That does not in Pinter’s view disqualify a writer from having strong views about society and
politics and the shape of the world. I would argue it’s Pinter’s status and wealth that actually make
it possible for his views to be better known than if he were a totally obscure writer working in a
garret and was unperfomed. I see no contradiction. I think Pinter feels he’s earned the right to
enjoy good food and wine but it doesn’t in anyway disqualify or smother his passionate and
intense radicalism.
SPECIFIC THEMES
David Newman, Manchester
Considering Harold Pinter's fanaticism about cricket, isn't it rather surprising he's never written a
play that's set at a cricket match or has a cricket player as one of his characters? After all, there
are enough Pinteresque pauses in a game of cricket to satisfy even Harold Pinter.
Michael Billington
Pinter loves cricket and indeed lives for cricket and puts more energy into running a cricket team,
The Gaieties, than he does into almost anything else. There is a cricket match in one of his films,
Accident and it’s actually extremely important in the context of that movie. I think the practical
problem is obvious, how do you put cricket onto the stage, because it requires 11 fielders and a
couple of batsmen and a couple of umpires? I think Pinter is too rough to try and put the game
physically onto the stage. But don’t forget the plays are shot through with references to cricket.
One of the great lines in The Birthday Party, when Goldberg and McCann are interrogating
Stanley, “Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?” and in No Man's Land there’s a lot of
references to an unseen female character and someone asks “How does she come off the
wicket... does she google?” So if you trace cricket language through Pinter’s plays you’ll find
there’s quite a lot.
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Nicholas Howard, Australia
Michael, would you say that the essence of Pinter's characters, as compared to those of radical
playwrights who preceded him (Pirandello and Beckett), is that instead of just being strangers to
others, they are also strangers to themselves?
Michael Billington
I think your observation is spot on. I think Pinter’s characters are strangers to themselves and if
you analyse some of the protagonists you can see this. Stanley in The Birthday Party is in many
ways a persecuted figure who’s hidden himself away but he himself could not explain his actions
and does not explain his actions, he just feels a sense of alienation. Davies in The Caretaker is a
man who’s lived on the margins of life and is therefore suspicious and wary of everyone around
him but lacks a sense of definition and it’s very interesting how that character keeps changing his
persona depending on who he’s with. He even has two names - he could be Davies, he could be
Jenkins and he doesn’t know who he is until he gets his papers which are down in Sidcup.
I think your point is just, I suppose the point Pinter is making is that this applies to many of us.
That we have a role in society, we have jobs, we have family relationships, we have friends. But
when the door closes at night and we are left alone in a room, do we actually know essentially
who we are? Or do we go through the day putting on a series of performances, a series of masks
and adopting a different series of personae and I think Pinter would say that we do. That is why,
when he’s asked to explain his characters he never will and he never can because there is
something in them that lies beyond rational explanation.
Brian Wood, Edinburgh
Given that Pinter was an enthusiastic fan of Joe Orton in the 1960s, do you think that Orton's
work, along with Harold's own early material, constituted the true advent of modern playwriting in
Britain? Also, did the absence of Orton as a sparring partner as it were have any material impact
on Pinter's approach to the use of comedy in his plays?
Michael Billington
I think there are obvious parallels between Orton and Pinter, and it’s very interesting that Orton in
his diaries, after writing Entertaining Mr Sloane, thinks that Pinter has actually absorbed some of
his ideas and re-heated and re-used them in a play like The Homecoming. I don’t think that’s true
at all. I think Pinter would have been Pinter without Orton, and Orton would have been Orton
without Pinter. There are parallels, but in the end I think they are different artists. I think Orton’s
characteristic for me is a pervasive and total cynicism about all human affairs. I think Pinter’s
defining characteristic is an awareness of the mystery and the perplexity of our existence on earth
and I think they were mining different aspects of human life.
Chris Adlington, Glasgow
Pinter has said his plays are about "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet". What does he mean?
Michael Bilington
That famous phrase was used by Pinter himself in a very early interview when he was attempting
to disarm interviewers, little did he realise it would haunt him the rest of his life. I think all he
meant was that his plays are about superficially recognisable worlds. But are also about the
things that are unspoken and disturbing and alarming in family life or domestic situations. In the
end I think although it’s a clever phrase it doesn’t do justice to Pinter’s richness.
A Newman, Lancashire
Why is Pinter's work often referred to as difficult?
Michael Billington
The strange fact is that critics often refer to Pinter as difficult and yet audiences seem to have an
intuitive understanding as to what these plays are about. The classic case for me was with early
Pinter when critics were complaining that The Birthday Party was impenetrable and even The
Caretaker was obscure. And at the same plays like The Lover were being shown on ITV on a
Sunday night and capturing audiences of millions.
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The plays are difficult only so far as that they allow the spectator or the reader to deduce what the
plays are about. Pinter’s plays do not come supplied with easy messages or easy solutions, they
allow us the dignity of deciding what they’re getting at. But I think when you see them performed
the plays become alive and understandable. These plays are both accessible and open and at
the same time available to an infinite number of meanings.
Bill Gelber
Does Pinter feel the same about performances of his plays as Beckett did, that their production
can have a finite number of interpretations?
Michael Billington
Pinter is much more relaxed than Beckett about interpretations of his plays. For me the problem
with Beckett was there was one and one way only in which to present the plays and that was the
way he specified. I think Pinter is freer and more open to interpretation. Pinter himself has
recorded his occasional bewilderment at some of the interpretations of his plays he’s seen in
other countries. He was talking recently about seeing what he thought was The Homecoming,
which we know begins with two people in a room and one of them asking where the scissors are.
When Pinter saw it in some East European city, it began with ghostly figures appearing at
windows and a woman in the background outside. Pinter asked who these people were. He was
told the mysterious figure in the background was Max’s wife and MacGregor who you never see
in The Homecoming at all. But Pinter allowed this to happen.
He has also talked about a French production of No Man’s Land, which is the play fuelled by drink
and which ended with empty bottles cascading down to the footlights in droves to make the point
that Hirst was a man encased in liquor. But Pinter realises these plays are not locked in. There is
no one correct interpretation, they are as open and as mysterious and as elusive as poems and
therefore with almost no exception he’s given directors and actors the freedom to interpret the
plays as they wish. He may not like or approve of what they do but he’s not going to stop them.
Robert Sutton, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
When I saw the last National Theatre production of The Homecoming it made me seriously
question Pinter's standing as a dramatist because he can't do female characters. The wife is just
not believable and the ending made the audience guffaw with incredulity. What do you think this
play tells us about Pinter on women?
Michael Billington
I would challenge your argument that he can’t do female characters. I think Pinter’s female
characters are extraordinarily resonant and often the agents of sympathy and concern. If you
think of some of Pinter’s very recent plays, Ashes to Ashes for instance, it is the female character
who has an understanding and awareness of human suffering which is denied to her male
counterpart. It seems to me that Pinter’s male characters are the ones who strut and stride and
bellow and bluster and are often revealed to be very hollow. It’s Pinter’s female characters who, I
think, exhibit compassion, sympathy and generosity.
As for The Homecoming, that will always cause problems but that is because I think people
misunderstand what is happening. Ruth in enters the house as a stranger and by the end she’s
taken over this family and appropriated the family and the assumption is she may become a
prostitute in order to keep the family alive. I don’t believe for one second that she will become a
prostitute. This is simply a dramatic device to show her power and her ascendancy over this gang
of pathetic and blustering Eastenders. But this is all a matter of subjective taste. I think you
should look again at Pinter’s women, I think they’re much more likable and sympathetic than you
allow.
ACTING
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David Mainwood
When Harold Pinter acts in his own plays, particularly his more explicitly political plays, he almost
invariably plays the character of the monster, the interrogator, the tormentor, the character that he
and the audience has least sympathy with. Is there a reason for this, and how far do you think
that, as an actor, he comes to inhabiting these roles?
Michael Billington
Intriguing question. I think it applies quite specifically to One for the Road where Pinter famously
played the interrogator, but he also has played Goldberg in The Birthday Party. I think it’s
because there’s a lot of juice in the writing. Pinter realises that if you’re going to write a play about
victimisation and interrogation, you have to give the leading character not only a rich personality
but also a level of complexity. I would offer you the example of the recent One for the Road. I
don’t know whether you saw that on BBC Four, but there’s a superb moment where Pinter is seen
for about a minute as the interrogator Nicholas before the victims arrive, sitting alone in a room,
with his head in his hands, not speaking. And it was as if Pinter was trying to explain to us that
even people in positions of authority and power over others are themselves riddled with some
kind of inner doubt and uncertainty about what they are doing. That is why Pinter likes to play
these roles, because they’re complex human beings.
Keith Chopping, London
Did Harold Pinter's experiences as an actor influence his writing and if so in what ways?
Michael Billington
Pinter’s years as an actor had a huge influence on his writing, particularly all those years in
English provincial reps in the 1950s. I can recommend a very good book by David T Thompson
called Pinter - The Player's Playwright which lists every single performance Pinter gave as an
actor. What you discover is that there are certain specific plays you can actually find Pinter using
dramatic techniques and devices from. There’s a play by Mary Hayley Bell which clearly
influenced The Birthday Party because there’s a dramatic climax when the lights are turned off
and the stage is thrown into darkness. My point is that Pinter has spent a lot of time playing
heavies, menacing figures, villains in fairly standard rep plays of the 1950s and this must have
had some input into his writing.
I think he also learnt from old-fashioned craftsman like Terence Rattigan and Noel Coward the
importance of dramatic tension of keeping the dialogue moving. There’s another influence that
may seem preposterous but, I think, is there. I was talking to a director in Germany some years
ago who was about to direct Pinter’s Moonlight. This director had also worked in repertory theatre
in England and he said, “Oh yes, I understand Moonlight totally. It’s a combination between Kafka
and Agatha Christie”. You’d be amazed how many Agatha Christie plays Pinter appeared in. All
his experiences as an actor fed into his dramatic writing and gave him an understanding of
tension, excitement and theatrical effect.
LANGUAGE
Eva Chaidemenou
Is Pinter a very English writer? Is he restricted to English audiences? Can foreigners totally
appreciate Pinter's mastery of words? In my opinion, a non-English audience may be able to
capture his genius but not his wordplay, which is almost impossible to translate. Would you
agree?
Michael Billington
You pick out a wonderful paradox. Yes, Pinter is an extremely English writer. His choice of idiom
is extremely English, indeed it’s much based on East End, cockney Jewish language a lot of the
time. Simon Grey once compared Pinter to Dickens in that he creates these exuberant larger-
than-life characters. At the same time I’ve seen the plays in many foreign countries and
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audiences seem to grab the essential idea behind the play. They understand the terror, the
insecurity, the fear that these characters are going through.
What I think is hard to achieve is an exact translation of the words themselves. There’s a hilarious
example from The Birthday Party from one of the characters, Goldberg or McCann, who says
“Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?” This is an obtuse cricket reference which when the play
was done in Germany was translated literally as “Who peed against the city gate in Melbourne?”
which was meaningless rubbish.
I once asked Pinter’s French translator who had done The Homecoming how you get into French
“He’ll be chuffed to his bollocks”. He said it is very difficult. It’s hard to achieve a precise rhythm of
Pinter’s language, but I still believe the plays are translatable in the broad sense in that they
become understandable. So yes these plays are rooted in English life and phraseology but they
also I think deal with larger universal concerns.
Christopher McLeish, Glasgow
To what extent are the tensions portrayed by Pinter, in his dramatic work, reflected in his personal
life?
Michael Billington
The real connection, I think, between Pinter’s life and work is in language. When I interviewed
Pinter for my book, I would play back my tapes and listen to Pinter talking and what would
astonish me is that the rhythm of his conversation is very like the rhythm of his plays. Pinter does
speak with quite exaggerated pauses and with frequent hesitations. That to me is the real
connection. I would not suggest to you that Pinter’s average day is like any of his characters,
thank goodness. I think that extraordinary dramatic poetry Pinter created in which language is
often a camouflage or there is something going on underneath the dialogue that is not quite
expressed comes from Pinter’s own acute inner ear.
Brendan Ashton, Barrow in Furness
The dialogue in The Homecoming and The Caretaker is unsettling at times. Is this due to it being
unreal or is it that I am used to plays only using dialogue that is a vehicle for the plot and anything
else is superfluous? Or have I totally missed the point?
Michael Billington
What is unnerving about Pinter’s dialogue is that it’s familiar and realistic on one level and yet on
another level it’s not at all familiar. What is familiar immediately is the use of clauses and the use
of everyday phrases and repetitions. What makes it unfamiliar is that Pinter then orchestrates this
and uses this to create something slightly artificial. I think it’s true of the settings and the worlds of
these plays. If you look at The Homecoming, yes it’s taking place in a house in Hackney such as
you could walk into today. But the things that happen in which a family appropriate the wife of
their brother or their son and attempt to use her as a prostitute, is not I assume an everyday
occurrence. So the plays constantly inhabit a world that is partly real and partly grotesque and
imaginary. I think that’s what gives these plays such power over our imagination. We both
understand the language and the setting and yet there is something there that is beyond
explanation.
Alison E Bayne, North Yorkshire
In everyday life, how does Harold react to uncomfortable silences?
Michael Billington
I’d say in real life, Pinter doesn’t really react to uncomfortable silences but often creates them.
When I listen back to my tape recordings with Pinter in my book, I was stunned by the long gaps
between words. It was largely because he was almost searching for the exact word and the exact
means of expression, wanting to be understood as clearly as possible. There is a staccato rhythm
to Pinter’s conversation that is the same as you find in the plays. Peter Hall has said all the
dramatists he knows speak much as they write, or that if you want to understand the rhythm of
their plays you have to listen to the rhythm of their conversation. Peter Shaffer, for example, will
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talk with a mellifluous fluency, Harold Pinter will talk in everyday conversation with a sometimes
jerky hesitancy. So silences in Pinter’s plays are partly a reflection of the silences you find in
Pinter’s life.
Maarten Poiesz, Amsterdam
To what extent do you think the image of language as a weapon or means of power throughout
Pinter's plays can be seen as a crystallisation of the language of political (particularly totalitarian)
regimes?
Michael Billington
I think this is a very profound point about Pinter. It’s often been observed that Pinter’s personal
and domestic plays have a political edge, quite simply because they are about the struggle for
domination and authority over other people. Equally, Pinter’s political plays show how language
itself is a tool of domination. It therefore becomes a metaphor for the political process, to take a
very clear example, a play like The Caretaker, may simply seem to be a play about an old,
scruffy, vagrant who comes into a house and tries to manipulate two brothers and play one off
against the other. It actually is a microcosmic study of the political process. What it shows is the
character misjudging the political situation with fatal consequences. But in his use of language,
Davies also tries to achieve some kind of stability in his household just as Mick attempts to bully
him through his use of language. Yes, language in Pinter is always part of the mechanism of
power that gives a political edge to almost everything he’s ever written.
INFLUENCE AND INFLUENCES
Julio Martino, North East
Pinter is undeniably one of the greatest living dramatists. But will his plays survive him? His great
plays of the 60s, for example, are recognisably of the 60s. Do you think they will beome period
pieces, or will they remain open for fresh interpretations by future generations of readers, theatre-
goers and theatre makers?
Michael Billington
Pinter’s plays obviously belong to their era, The Birthday Party is of the late 1950s, The Caretaker
and The Homecoming belong to the 1960s and there are references to that world. And yet his
plays make total sense when they’re revived nearly 50 years later. I don’t see any contradiction or
paradox in this. I think all plays operate on two levels. They are both expressions of the time in
which they are written and they’re expressions of eternal truths in human behaviour and that
applies any first rate writer. So I don’t think Pinter’s plays will date in the sense you mean. I think
they will be available down the decades because they’re dealing with qualities in human life,
particularly insecurity, uncertainty, fear and terror that remain permanent.
Adrian Fear, London
In the pantheon of great British playwrights where would you place Pinter and why?
Michael Billington
I don’t compile lists of playwrights in batting order. You have to start with Shakespeare out in front
anyway and the rest following on a distance behind which I think Pinter would be the first to
acknowledge. I would rate Pinter highly as one of the great 20th-century playwrights not just in
Britain but everywhere else for several reasons. He helped redefine the nature of theatre. He
demolished an idea of the omniscient author. What Pinter did was to show that the dramatist is
someone who can present exciting evidence and then leave it to the audience to deduce what
that evidence actually means. Secondly, I think, Pinter did revolutionise speech in British theatre
and language. Before Pinter there was something called poetry and there was something called
prose. Poetry was always heightened and rather flowery and occupied so many words per line
and prose was rather drab and flat. Pinter’s fantastic achievement, I think, was to create a prose
poetry of his own and to take the ordinary speech of everyday and bring out its poetic quality, its
rhythms, its repetitions, its hesitations, its sudden flowerings into ecstatic speech.
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I suppose thirdly what Pinter did, was to create archetypal characters on stage. Figures like
Davies the tramp in The Caretaker or Max, the bullying patriarch, in The Homecoming embody
something much larger themselves. Davies becomes an archetype for a man who is both
persecuted and a persecutor and Max becomes a prototype of the head of the household who is
riddled with sexual and emotional insecurity. He creates huge characters on the stage. I would
simply say his work will live on whether he occupies number five or number seven in the batting
order.
Tim Evans, London
Pinter was influenced early on by Samuel Becket, and in a sense their writing and style have
been paralleld. Do you think a new generation of writers influenced in turn by Pinter can continue
this style of the unexplained, and still maintain an originality, without the label of Pinteresque?
Michael Billington
I think there was a dangerous period in the 1960s when imitators of Pinter were everywhere, in
fact one critic dubbed them the Pinteretti. Everyone seemed to be writing sub-Pinter dialogue full
of unfinished sentences and unexplained evasions. I think we’re through that period. I think the
younger generation of British dramatists all acknowledge Pinter’s influence and power and all
admire his work. I’m speaking of figures like Patrick Marber who’s directed Pinter’s plays and of
Mark Ravenhill and indeed the late Sarah Kane who was very close to Pinter and very fond of
him. But I think they have found a voice of their own and I think have managed to absorb Pinter
without simply reproducing them.
Heathcliff Blair, Roehampton
It has been said about both Pinter and Stanley Kubrick that part of the pleasure of their work
comes from never quite knowing what is going on. This could be said about many other artists
from working or lower middle-class backgrounds of that generation. Did this invigorating dramatic
ambiguity arise solely from the influence of Beckett and Brecht, or from a more liberal post-war
culture that, at last, trusted the likes of Pinter to invite audiences to think for themselves? Today,
it seems that such invitations are actually regarded by critics as patronising - a stance more
Orwellian than Pinteresque.
Michael Billington
Your question is getting at something very important. I think the arrival of Pinter’s work in the late
1950s and through the 60s and onwards coincides with an important cultural shift. What Pinter
understood is that we are living at a time when there are no answers to questions about human
motivation and behaviour. When we do not expect dramatic situations to be resolved. When we
didn’t expect plays or works of art to provide us with solutions.
To a large extent Beckett had anticipated this with a play like Waiting for Godot in 1955 which
presents humanity looking for an answer to life’s problems and meaning and not finding it. Brecht,
I think, is a red herring in this context, he is totally different in that Brecht does provide social
solutions to human problems. But it’s very interesting that Pinter’s work emerges in the early
1960s at a time when the cinema and fiction were also exploring doubt and ambiguity. There was
a famous film by Antonioni, called La Venturra, which came out around the same time as The
Birthday Party and The Caretaker. In it a woman goes missing and a group of her friends go in
search of her, the film offers no explanation as to what happened to her, you never know whether
she committed suicide, you never know whether she chose to disappear or what happened. In
the same way Pinter’s plays take a human situation and leave it to the audience to supply the
answer or the missing information – where does Stanley go at the end of The Birthday Party? We
don’t know, Pinter does not know, he expects the audience to provide any answer they choose.
Pinter is part of a major shift in culture when first of all works of art do not supply answers and
secondly when audiences and spectators take on themselves the responsibility for supplying the
information. Briefly, the novelist Paul Auster says that when you’re writing the reader is doing the
writing with you. Part of the writing experience, and in the same way in the theatre, the spectator
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is now part of the experience. We would be insulted by modern drama that dotted all the i’s and
crossed the t’s so I think Pinter shows an extraordinary awareness of a shift in narrative style.
Meirion Rice
Do you think Pinter and his work would have been different had he gone to university?
Michael Billington
It’s a very interesting hypothetical question. My hunch is he wouldn’t have been half as good a
playwright if he had gone to university. I’m sure he would have written and I’m sure he would
have written plays. Three years of academic discipline might have actually stifled his imagination.
The great thing about Pinter’s early life is that it combines his experiences of Hackney and the
East End, his experiences in Ireland, his peregrinations around the South Coast as a rep actor.
Somehow all this emerges and finds shape and form in early plays like The Room and The
Birthday Party.
Pinter does not write intellectual plays of ideas, he does not write theoretical plays. He writes
plays based directly on experiences of life and my claim is the plays have an absolutely clear
connection with Pinter’s biography. University might have made Pinter a more cerebral dramatist
but not a better one.
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