HE made brooding silence into an art form, but after 50 years Harold Pinter has said directors should be free to cut his trademark pauses if they want, writes Olivia Cole.

The playwright, 76, whose citation for the Nobel prize in 2005 paid tribute to him for inspiring the adjective Pinteresque, says he has been misunderstood. He maintains that while others detected disturbing undertones, he merely intended basic stage instructions.

“These damn silences and pauses are all to do with what’s going on . . . and if they don’t make any sense, then I always say cut them. I think they’ve been taken much too far these silences and pauses in my plays. I’ve really been extremely depressed when I’ve seen productions in which a silence happens because it says silence or a pause happens because it says pause. And it’s totally artificial and meaningless.

“When I myself act in my own plays, which I have occasionally, I’ve cut half of them, actually.”

Pinter wrote 140 pauses into his work Betrayal, 149 into The Caretaker and 224 into The Homecoming. The longest are typically 10 seconds.

Pinter’s remarks have bemused directors.Sir Peter Hall said it would be a “failure” for a director or actor to ignore the pauses. “A pause in Pinter is as important as a line. They are all there for a reason. Three dots is a hesitation, a pause is a fairly mundane crisis and a silence is some sort of crisis.

“Beckett started it and Harold took it over to express that which is inexpressible in a very original and particular way, and made them something which is his,” he said.

However, he said Pinter, who spoke in a Channel 4 documentary to be broadcast later this month, was right to criticise productions in which actors were fetishising their pauses.

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