A history of Harold Pinter on stage

From 'The Room' to 'Celebration': Time Out celebrates the colossal stage career of Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter

With ‘The Hothouse’ closing at the National Theatre a few weeks ago, this is one of those rare occasions when Harold Pinter’s name is not to be found in Time Out’s Theatre listings. Usually, there’s a revival of one of his plays being mounted. He’s not just in demand as a playwright. He first made his living as an actor and only last year memorably appeared in ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ by his old friend Samuel Beckett. He’s also a skilled director and was often to be seen at Almeida first nights.

Dubbed ‘comedies of menace’, his work explores the invasion of territory, the abuse of power, the intricacies of male friendship, and what he once described as ‘the mistiness of the past’. His first play was produced 50 years ago when his school friend, Henry Woolf, who was studying drama at Bristol University, asked Pinter if he had anything he could stage. ‘The Room’, revived at the Almeida in 2000 to celebrate Pinter’s seventieth birthday, is set in the kind of boarding house that must have been familiar to the playwright when he was touring the country as an actor under the name of David Baron.

The adventurous producer, Michael Codron, then staged ‘The Birthday Party’(1958), which toured out of town before coming into the Lyric Hammersmith. It’s a famous story now, how all the reviews were dreadful and the play was taken off on the Saturday before Harold Hobson’s glowing review appeared in the Sunday Times the following morning. When Pinter gave an entertaining and generous speech to the Critics’ Circle in 2000, he made it clear that he had been so depressed by the initial response to ‘The Birthday Party’ that he was close to giving up theatre altogether. Two artists appear in his 1975 play ‘No Man’s Land’: Spooner, a minor, poverty-stricken poet and big drinker; and Hirst, a wealthy, isolated, and successful man of letters. Perhaps they represented Pinter’s fears of who he might have become and who he feared turning into.

Critics soon realised how wrong they had been. ‘The Caretaker’ was presented at the Arts in 1960 with Donald Pleasence as Jenkins (or is it Davies?). Then came Pinter’s long association with the RSC and Peter Hall including ‘The Homecoming’ in 1965, possibly his greatest play, in which Pinter’s first wife Vivien Merchant shone as the slinky Ruth. He then moved with Hall to the National Theatre for ‘No Man’s Land’. Nothing’s ever secure in the world of playwriting, however, and critics dumped on ‘Betrayal’ (1978). Once again, they were proved wrong and it has become one of his most popular plays.

The ’80s were turbulent years for Pinter. Personally he was much happier following his marriage to Antonia Fraser. But he was not impressed by Margaret Thatcher and events in Nicaragua and Turkey concerned him. ‘One for the Road’ and ‘Mountain Language’ are two of his most overtly political plays. But then a new relationship with the Almeida was established and, in relatively quick succession, he wrote ‘Party Time’ (1991) in which a country’s bourgeoisie gather for cocktails, indifferent to what is happening on the streets outside, ‘Moonlight’ (1993), a mysterious play about the past which brought Ian Holm back to the stage, ‘Ashes to Ashes’ (1996) for the Royal Court and finally ‘Celebration’ (1999), set in a fashionable restaurant not dissimilar to The Ivy. The Almeida presented it in a double bill with ‘The Room’, creating a stark contrast between the drab ’50s boarding house and ’90s affluence. Since then, he has stopped writing plays though he continues to express his views forcefully both in poetry and prose.

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