It leads me on to a question about the characters in his plays.   It seems to me that there is often a character who is telling another character what they are like, dictating who they are. Existentialist philosopher Sartre believed that we shouldn’t allow other people to dictate who we are. We should take responsibility for ourselves and our own lives. Is this something Pinter was concerned with?

Without a doubt. Many of his characters, especially in the early plays, are people who you could say are sleepwalking through life, possibly avoiding facing some aspect of reality that is just too much for them. Harold understood that while this may be natural and understandable, nevertheless it leaves a person open to aggression and invasion from hostile forces. You may have to fight for your life at the drop of a hat, so you’d best be awake and alert. Innocence won’t save you. I mean, it’s impossible to forget in this context that Pinter was Jewish. He knew perfectly well what had happened to Europe’s innocent Jews, to say nothing of what would have happened to the UK’s Jews had Hitler crossed the channel.



What other major things do you believe Pinter was concerned about and raised through his plays?

The human right to freedom was at the heart of Pinter’s philosophy: freedom to love, to speak truth, to express oneself creatively, to resist oppression. The abuse of power horrified Pinter. He felt compelled where possible to defend and protect those who were under the boot of tyranny. He used his voice and his indignant rage to hold bullies and tyrants to account wherever he could, even if only on stage.



You mentioned in your workshop that you believed Pinter was firstly a poet and this was reflected in his work. How does this manifest itself in his plays?

He really loves the English language. None of his grandparents spoke English well, and so there is a sense of Pinter discovering and falling in love with the power and amazing potency of English. This grows as he is introduced to Shakespeare, Webster, Dylan Thomas, many other writers. The poet in him loved both linguistic excess, and the power of economy (maybe he picked that up also from reading the works of his literary hero, Samuel Becket); how a poet can create the most impact with the fewest words; how it is possible to compress complex emotion into an essence (also how repetition generates tension and weirdness). Perhaps ultimately, he is obsessed by the power of silence, those intense moments in life where language itself isn’t adequate, and what’s not said somehow becomes more potent and profound that what is.



You and I both agree that we often see new writing plays which are very self-explanatory which isn’t very theatrical. What might we see in a Pinter play that we could call theatrical?

There’s a sense of the mythic in Pinter. Look at THE ROOM, his first play, written in two days. It climaxes with a sudden and shocking racist murder, and the leading character spontaneously loses her eyesight! The audience leave the theatre totally stunned and bewildered, with their molecules re-arranged. That’s the true power of theatre: to drop the audience out of normal time and space into our collective mythic imagination, and, from that stranger, more eternal and timeless place, take them on an astonishing journey of discovery. When the curtain falls the characters, the audience and the actors are never quite the same again. In recent times I have observed a tendency for certain theatres to programme material that plays to the fashion of the day. Maybe this sells tickets, but it makes for very predictable and untheatrical evenings at the theatre…



Some of Pinter’s plays are rather difficult to comprehend. Coming back to philosophy there is the idea of ‘thrownness’. We are all thrown into the world without any rule book. There is something here about the world of Pinter, we are thrown into it.   Is there a rule book?

Harold Pinter never messes with the audience’s minds just for the sake of it. He is never deliberately obtuse or confusing. On the other hand, he did remark that if he had to identify a fault in his own writing it would be that he possibly cut too much. Certainly, he refuses to explain, believing that his characters always leave the audience clues as to what they want. That obsessive cutting away of the inessential is the hallmark of a poet, rather than of a clever intellectual trying to make the audience feel dumb. He actually treats the audience with great respect, in as much as he keeps ahead of them, rather than letting them get ahead of the story, as so many other playwrights do. There’s no rule book, but it helps to see and read his plays on the page, in addition to seeing them onstage. Perhaps there is an unwritten rule book of a kind for the actors working on a Pinter play: they must willingly surrender to what’s on the page. Resistance is futile. One must simply serve the play and the playwright. This is both humbling and empowering. Once an actor can pass through the eye of Pinter’s needle, she or he will discover a marvellous and rare freedom. I recently interviewed Dame Penelope Wilton and she spoke very eloquently about this.

Harold Pinter with Lee Evans & Jason Isaacs who starred in THE DUMB WAITER in 2007 directed by Harry Burton (Photography Dan Wooton)