http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/de...ld-pinter-dies
One of the greatest dramatists of the 20th Century. Certainly my favourite and one of the few famous people I might have liked to meet one day, however long the odds of that happening. I feel genuinely sad.
But hey, at least this might mean a retrospective of his work on the BBC this year. Controller willing.
Some clips:
A scene from The Birthday Party. This is the film version. There's actually a better TV version in which Pinter appears himself as Goldberg. But the casting of McCann here is very good.
A scene from The Homecoming.
Here's one of his seventies TV plays, for those of you who don't have UK TV. No guarantee of that retrospective anyway. I haven't seen this yet, so can't vouch for it, but it was the only thing I could find complete on Youtube.
Excepts from a very great speech at the National Student Drama Festival, Bristol, 1962:
'I'm not a theorist. I'm not an authoritative or reliable commentator on the dramatic scene, the social scene, any scene. I write plays, when I can manage it, and that's all. That's the sum of it. So I'm speaking with some reluctance, knowing that there are at least twenty-four possible aspects of any single statement, depending on where you're standing at the time or what the weather's like. A categorical statement I find will never stay where it is and be finite. It will immediately be subject to modification by the other twenty-three possibilities of it. No statement I make, therefore, should be interpreted as final and definitive. One or two of them may sound final and definitive, they may even be almost final and definitive, but I won't regard them as such tomorrow, and I wouldn't like you to do so today.'
On an early performance in Dusseldorf:
'I was at once booed violently by what must have been the finest collection of booers in the world. I thought they were using megaphones, but it was pure mouth. The cast was as dogged as the audience, however, and we took thirty-four curtain calls, all to boos.'
'What I write has absolutely no obligation to anything other than itself.'
'A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'
'Apart from any other consideration, we are faced with the immense difficulty, if not impossibility, of verifying the past... If one can speak of the difficulty of knowing what in fact took place yesterday, one can, I think, treat the present in the same way. What's happening now? We won't know until tomorrow or in six months' time, and we won't know then...'
'The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear.'
Any my favourite bit by far:
'We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: "Failure of Communication"... and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think we communicate only too well...'
The whole thing is worth quoting, but that would probably be illegal and anyway I haven't got the patience to type it all out.
Thanks for everything, Harold.