Remembering Harold Pinter

Just over a year since his death, Harold Pinter is the subject of two new films. Dave Calhoun previews two documentaries about an exceptional cultural figure

Shortly before his new cinematic spin on Anthony Shaffer’s play ‘Sleuth’ was released in late 2007, Harold Pinter remarked to Time Out, ‘Me? I’m not going anywhere,’ when casually asked during a photo session at a west London restaurant how things were going for him. Sadly, it wasn’t true. He died 14 months later on Christmas Eve 2008, aged 78, killed finally by liver cancer after spending the previous six years fighting successfully against several other illnesses, including cancer of the oesophagus, with which he was first diagnosed in 2001.

Pinter may have been intermittently weak, but those final years were hardly quiet for him. In 2005, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature and responded to his win by delivering a terrific speech about art and politics, filmed in a London television studio because he was unable to travel to Sweden to deliver it in person. In 2006, he performed Beckett’s ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ for several nights at the Royal Court Theatre. His body was frail, but his voice remained strong.

Right to the end he was an angry opponent of American imperialism and especially the war in Iraq. I’ll never forget how, during a interview at his home a few days before the photoshoot mentioned above, he spat bile at a snide reference in the Evening Standard that suggested his poems were not even real poetry. After making his initial point, he paused and recited the accused, four-line poem about American democracy in full, before looking me in the eyes and declaring, ‘Well, bollocks! As far as I’m concerned, it’s a poem all right!’ All I could manage was a nervous, spluttered, ‘Er, yes… it is!’

Now, just over a year since Pinter’s death, several new tributes are emerging to one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers. Antonia Fraser, his wife, last week published ‘Must You Go?’, an edited version of the diaries she kept during the 33 years she lived with him and which function both as intimate biography and high-end literary soap opera. Television, too, has been paying tribute to the writer of plays ranging from ‘The Birthday Party’ in 1958 to ‘Celebration’ in 2000, and two new documentaries, both made for television, will screen in London, one at the ICA, the other at BFI Southbank.

The first is a BBC Arena film called ‘Harold Pinter – A Celebration’ and is a record of a memorial event that took place in summer 2009 at the National Theatre. Apparently a real-time document of the performance from curtain rise to fall, we watch a medley of scenes from plays such as ‘The Caretaker’ and ‘Betrayal’ and hear readings of his poems, as well as extracts from ‘Mac’ – the prose tribute he wrote in the mid-1960s to the Irish actor-manager Anew McMaster, for whom he worked in the 1950s – read hilariously by Douglas Hodge. The cast list from that evening will resonate strongly with any reader of Fraser’s diaries: it features many of the same actors who performed in Pinter’s works over the years, from David Bradley and Kenneth Cranham to Jude Law and Michael Sheen. The evening’s director was Ian Rickson, who directed Pinter in ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ and helmed a revival of ‘The Hothouse’ at the National in 2007. Cheekily but fittingly, Rickson ends the evening with a long, silent pause, one of the features of Pinter’s plays which he almost came to regret after it was so often quoted back to him by everyone from actors to journalists. It provokes a wicked laugh of recognition from the National audience.

The second new film, ‘Pinter’s Progress’, is a documentary by 79-year-old director and former actor Philip Saville and will screen at the ICA on Sunday in a double-bill with ‘Butley’, the 1974 movie of Simon Gray’s play and the only film Pinter ever directed. Saville directed Pinter’s ‘A Night Out’ for television in 1960 and draws in names such as Michael Caine, James Fox and Steven Berkoff to help him, in his words, ‘search out what made him tick’. The film is simply constructed of talking heads and clips, but the interviews are revealing. Berkoff talks eloquently of a ‘victim psychosis’ in Jewish writers, while Caine quips, ‘When Harold said he didn’t believe in God, I said I didn’t believe in him.’ Henry Goodman, another Jew from the East End, who played Goldberg in a 2005 revival of ‘The Birthday Party’, puts it nicely when he says of Pinter’s work, ‘All the time, he was watching for the scumbags, for the needy from the greedy.’

‘Harold Pinter – A Celebration’ screens at BFI Southbank at 8.20pm on Jan 20 2010 and on BBC Four at 9pm on Jan 24 2010. ‘Pinter’s Progress’ and ‘Butley’ screen at the ICA at 3.30pm on Jan 24 2010.

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