NILANJANA S ROY: PINTER’S BIRTHDAY PARTY

Business Standard, India
Oct 17 2005

SPEAKING VOLUMES

The audience had been queuing for an hour in order to hear Harold
Pinter speak at Edinburgh. This was 2002; the Iraq invasion was in
progress and phrases like “freedom-loving people” and “axis of evil”
were the common currency of the day.

Pinter had just recovered from major surgery for cancer of the
oesophagus, and written a poem-Cancer Cells-to celebrate, his first
published poem in decades. We expected him to speak about his fight
with cancer, which he did, eloquently and movingly.

And then he moved on to the matter of the US war in Iraq, and made
his strong opposition perfectly clear. Pinter likened Tony Blair’s
plans to bomb Iraq to an act of “premeditated murder”.

He spoke of the war as an exercise in power, he spoke of the silence
and acceptance that greeted the ritualised killing of people outside
the “Western world” and he said: “I could be a bit of a pain in the
a***. Since I’ve come out of my cancer, I must say I intend to be
even more of a pain in the a***.”

In the three years since his Edinburgh comeback, Pinter has kept that
promise. He has heckled Bush and Blair, campaigned against the war,
and written cheerfully obscene poetry slamming the US army’s tactics
in Iraq.

This record has helped many see the 2005 Nobel, awarded to Pinter
shortly after his 75th birthday, as one of the most politically
charged decisions in the history of the literature Prize. The Nobel
announcement was delayed by a week; there was speculation that the
Academy was considering Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer who’s in
trouble for speaking out against the Armenian genocide. (Turkey
officially refuses to accept that the mass killings of Armenians
occurred on the scale on which Pamuk and other observers point to,
and refuses to call those murders genocide.) There is now much
speculation, as one commentator put it, that this year’s Prize is a
rebuke to America, an anti-US Nobel.

To see the Prize simply as a politically correct decision would be
to overlook Pinter’s work. That would be naïve: I cannot see how you
could possibly look at this century in theatre-and film-and ignore
Harold Pinter’s contribution. (He would probably be amused to know
that in Calcutta theatre troupes, a standard stage direction was:
“Aaro Pinteresque deen, dada!”, meaning that more Pinteresque pauses
were necessary.)

His first two plays, The Room and The Birthday Party, were ahead
of their time. Their themes would eventually become familiar,
much-imitated cliches of the stage-the damage that families inflict
on each other, the struggle for power in everyday domestic life, the
power of obsession, violence and the erotic, all of this presented by
a man who had a gift for listening to the silences that lie between
the lines.

The Birthday Party ran for just a week, initially, before being taken
off, and Pinter tells of how he met an usher on his way to one of
the last performances. She asked who he was; he said he was the author.

“Oh, are you?” she said. “Oh, you poor darling.”

The late Samuel Beckett, who greeted his Nobel Prize with dismay
rather than Pinter’s expletive-laden exclamation of delight, had
rather less trouble than those early audiences in recognising his
younger colleague’s talent.

He and Pinter met often; I would have liked to have been a fly on
the wall when Edward Albee, Beckett and Pinter spent a long evening
in a pub discussing the Marquis de Sade-the three great chroniclers
of the absurdities of modern times on the life of the sensualist who
took the pursuit of pleasure to lengths beyond the absurd. Pinter
sent Beckett his plays, in typescript, and Beckett reserved a special
place in his library for Pinter’s dedication copies.

Pinter’s plays, from The Room to Ashes to Ashes and Remembrances
of Things Past, are still performed today. If you’ve seen the film
versions of The Comfort of Strangers, The French Lieutenant’s Woman,
The Trial or The Last Tycoon, to name just a few of his adaptations,
you know that he is also one of the greatest screenplay writers of
our time.

What I’m looking at is not the work, or the man, but at his signature:
Harold Pinter, scrawled in a bold, unwavering hand right across the
page, the letters large and uncompromising. That signature, the mark
of the author, the political protestor, the man who refuses to back
down, is scrawled all across the 20th century.

–Boundary_(ID_c0A+vSxvFceJu1HA7vWvKw)–