HP RIP

Amid all the tributes to Harold Pinter over the last week, this obituary in The Economist struck me as the most concise and insightful.

In Beckett, a strong influence on Mr Pinter in his beginnings, ordinary conversations would turn metaphysical. His own were packed with menace. Words were offensive, defensive, barriers, knives, stones, a “stratagem” or a “mocking smoke screen”, as he put it, to cover nakedness. Underneath them, something else was being said. Truth was being smothered. He had felt it himself: the suffocation of drama school (abandoned after two terms), or National Service (doggedly resisted, and the fine paid, in 1949), or the bourgeois smugness of the London theatre scene in the late 1950s, which he had tried to explode. Like him, his characters often suddenly made for the window, desperate for air. Or they fell silent. Silence, applied almost musically and poetically, let the dark in. Or the unsaid. 

I also liked this piece by Mark Lawson about how Pinter's dialogue, although it might seem strange written down, was actually a revolution of naturalism.

Some of the dramatist's obituaries treated him as an intellectual obscurist who never quite broke through to the general public; but his plays for ITV in the 1960s were seen by dozens of millions, part of the democratisation of drama that the new medium achieved. Seen now, A Night Out - in which shifty young men keep secrets from craggy but canny matriarchs in exchanges littered with slang, euphemism and stutterings - feels like a Cockney grandma to numerous sitcoms and soap operas, up to EastEnders. Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, writers of Hancock's Half-Hour and Steptoe & Son, have acknowledged that in Pinter they recognised a colleague in the project of showing the heights low London speech could reach.

One thing that has been underrated, I think, is Pinter's acting. As Max in The Homecoming on Radio 3 a few years ago he was terrifying, funny, pathetic and completely believable. I would have loved to see him as Roote in The Hothouse.

I never saw him act on stage, but he was in the front row for (excellent) readings of The Room and The Dumb Waiter at the Royal Court Upstairs in 2006. A powerful presence even just seated in the audience.