So that’s it. Tomorrow I’ll have to ring up and cancel my lunch with
Harold Pinter. He had already cancelled once before, and it seemed like a
warning: the once athletic body which held that fierce soul was becoming
more and more frail, besieged, I think, not so much by chemotherapy but by
its unpredictable consequences and his rage at going towards the light.
Of course, it’s possible that Harold himself might have cancelled the lunch,
but for a different reason. For the past few weeks I had been in his black
books. I had written an unfavourable review of the current production of No
Man’s Land and it was, among other things, critical of Michael Gambon’s
performance. Harold met a friend of mine in a restaurant and sent me a
message. It read like this.
Friend: Hello, Harold. How are you?
Harold (Menacing growl. He doesn’t like being asked how he is): Will you give
John a message for me?
Friend: Yes, of course, Harold. Harold: Tell him he’s wrong about Michael
Gambon. (Pause.) It’s offensive.
Anger like this never lasted long with Pinter. He was too big a man, with too
big a heart to nourish resentment. In fact, he could take criticism in his
stride. Reviewing the premiere of Ashes to Ashes, I took a deep breath and
wrote that the echo scene near the end was the only example I could recall
of sentimentality in his work.
I did wonder if I was unleashing something or other. But no, I received a
short letter thanking me, and followed by a PS: “Sorry you didn’t like the
echo. Ah well.”
Six years ago Ashes to Ashes had a West End revival. I was on holiday, and my
colleague Robert Hewison was holding the fort. Robert did not like Ashes to
Ashes. I was particularly struck by one sentence: “Pinter is parodying
himself.” Hello, I thought, this will not go down well in Holland Park.
It didn’t. Arriving home I found a letter with the unmistakable handwriting.
Harold was not pleased. His letter included whole lines of exclamation marks
and question marks. I realised he had been too indignant to note Robert’s
initials at the end of the review. He thought it was by me and that I had
changed my views about the play to the point of treachery.
After a few moments I began to see the funny side of the situation, and a few
days later I wrote a play of 14 pages called Parodies. I wrote it, I hope,
in Harold’s style, and sent it to him with a letter of explanation.
Should I have done this? For a few days I brooded. Will he think that I am
mocking him? I need not have worried. Harold’s reply was enchanting. “I am
an idiot!” he wrote. “Forgive me.” I cannot imagine that he has written such
words to many people. He said that Parodies was “very funny” and that “all
this” had been worthwhile because it had made me write it. A big man, with a
big heart, and one who had the rare virtue of being able to laugh at himself.
Harold could be difficult, oh yes. Like so many of his characters, he deployed
attack as a means of self-defence and investigation. No other dramatist has
understood, let alone dramatised with such frank and shocking understanding,
the needs and perils of human relations. Much has been written about his
plays as examples of territorial invasion and menacing invaders; but the
fact is that in most of the plays the invader is invited in by the occupant
in an act of defensive hospitality.
In The Caretaker the tramp Davies is invited in by the solitary, mentally
damaged Aston. In No Man’s Land it is the rich, successful literateur Hirst
who encounters the shabby, pushy scribbler Spooner on Hampstead Heath and
brings him home. Will he stay? Will Davies stay and become a caretaker? You
could say that many of Pinter’s plays are experiments in human relations and
are open-ended in a very special way – yes, let us say a very Pinteresque
way. The language of the endings is spare, heavy with indecision,
expectation and anxiety. What now? You feel that these characters have
something deeply felt to say, some revelation, some solution to a dilemma
that had never been made entirely clear but only cautiously circled as if it
were a landmine. You end up with an ending but without the closure, which is
how things so often end in life.
I met Pinter, briefly and fleetingly, in the late 1970s, but our friendship,
if I may call it that, began some 10 years later. Friendship between a
playwright and a critic is a delicate matter. Dodgy. The critic might feel
that his judgment and objectivity could be undermined: will I have the
strength of mind to write that my new friend’s new play is rubbish and is
best forgotten? The playwright might think the critic might believe that
friendship is being offered as a part of some kind of deal.
Of course, the idea of Harold pondering about such an exquisite
moral-professional dilemma is laughable: I can imagine him hearing this and
rearing back in a mixture of incredulity and, to put it mildly, annoyance.
For my part I thought that the status of the author of The Homecoming, Old
Times and No Man’s Land was reasonably well established, and that if I
praised his work it would not seem like a shameful act of selling out.
It was in the production of No Man’s Land at the Almeida theatre, directed by
David Leveaux, with Harold himself playing a magnificently brooding and
imperious Hirst, and Paul Eddington playing an exquisitely creepy Spooner,
that I first saw Harold act. It was also the first time that I thought I
understood what the play was really about.
The following week a letter arrived. I recognised the handwriting at once.
Harold wrote his letters by hand: he was not the “Dictated by Mr Pinter and
signed in his absence” type of celebrity. It was not joined-up writing,
either: Harold wrote his words more or less letter by letter, as if stabbing
the paper before him, making every word seem irrevocable. He was inviting me
to lunch.
Harold’s preferred eating places were the Ivy and Le Caprice, but this lunch
took place in an unfashionable Italian restaurant off Kensington High
Street. There were few customers. The place was almost silent. Where was my
host? Then I saw Harold, leaning forward from behind a pillar, looking
secretive and waving me towards him. The unworthy thought flashed through my
mind that he did not want us to be seen together in public: hence, too, the
curious choice of restaurant. I had enough sense to discount this. For one
thing, I was, and am, not a public face. I think the reason for Harold’s
choice was that he had something important and personal to say.
I cannot remember what we had to eat or drink. Harold seemed a little tense:
there was a box of matches left by someone on the table that he pushed
around, picked up and put down again, looking around as if to make sure we
were alone. (He no longer smoked.) There were bits and pieces of small talk:
neither of us was very good at it. Finally he spoke. “It is very unusual,”
he said, “very unusual. (Pause.) Very. (Pause.) Unusual.
(Longer pause.) It is very unusual for (pause) for a critic (looking down at
the table, pause) for a critic to come towards the play. Towards. Towards a
play.”
By going towards the play he meant, I think, approaching it on its own terms,
attempting to grasp its intentions, scouring it for its meaning, and judging
it on those grounds, deciding whether the play fulfilled its own needs and
ambitions. Of course, that is what reviewing is about.
Most critics do, in fact, “go towards a play”, though one has heard of one or
two who never actually got there. But there was a passion in Harold’s voice
that showed how deeply committed he was both to plays that moved towards
their audience and to audiences, actors and critics who moved towards the
plays. It also explained to me, I thought, the immense love and respect
actors have always had for Pinter both as an actor and a director. He
understood how plays could be opened up for actors to find the keys to their
roles and their performances.
Harold’s cancer was a shocking surprise. He was in his seventies but still
looked like a man in his late forties. As it happens, I was at that time in
the black books once again. I had, a couple of months earlier, reviewed a
play by his lifelong friend Simon Gray at the Palace theatre in Watford. It
did not make the West End, and I gathered that Harold apparently decided
that it was my only mildly friendly review that was the cause. This is not
as flattering as people might think. Anyway, I knew where things stood when
I met him at a theatre and saw that his expression was predictably frosty.
“Hello Harold,” I said. This did not get me anywhere.
“How,” I said feebly, “how are things?” Pause. Harold: “What things?” Me:
“Well, er, you know, work? Life?” (Pause. I knew I was in trouble.) Harold:
“Some things are well. Other things (longer pause) are not well.”
Yes, I was in trouble, but when I rang him a couple of months later it was all
forgotten. Lunch followed. I remember grumbling about problems in my private
life and saying something rather harsh about someone. Harold said: “Well,
yes . . . but can I . . . as we are (pause) friends . . . suggest that you,
perhaps you should be considerate.” The word friends was spoken with caution
and reticence, like a hand stretched out thoughtfully, offering a gift.
His death has left a void in the world. Our next lunch was going to be a
celebration. We were both chuffed to the bollocks, as he once said in a
different context, that Gordon Brown had failed to get the bill for 42 days’
detention of suspects without charge past parliament. I couldn’t think of
anyone else to celebrate this with. He was a giant.
His last theatre appearance was in Samuel Beckett’s one-man play Krapp’s Last
Tape. He played it in a wheelchair. The great voice, still undiminished by
pain, seemed to shake the walls at the Royal Court. He played Krapp as an
angry man: angry at failure and at the passing of years, and grabbing the
world by its throat. Pain, endurance and an invincible dignity: this was one
of the great theatre experiences of my life.
Pinter changed the face of the theatre. At a time when so many plays have been
written for characters to fulfil a specific function and to represent a
specific opinion, he wrote plays for real multi-faceted characters, people
with secrets, people with a past, and, like most of us, with a dodgy future.
He hated the obscenities of power. He understood the thrills and agonies of
loving. He was a giant. He was a man, and I do not think we shall ever see
the like of him again.
