THE media brouhaha surrounding the "revelations" of the affair between Harold Pinter and Joan Bakewell prompted an article in the Guardian from Michael Billington on journalistic ethics, in the course of which he restated the central thesis of his book: "that Pinter's plays are triggered by a life experience and are then transmuted by his poetic imagination". As a description of the biography of a literary figure this may sound dangerously like a truism; but when you consider the aura of mystery and enigma that has surrounded the plays of Harold Pinter, it emerges as a bold quest and one which is fully vindicated by the book itself.
By firmly placing the playwright's work in the developing context of his life, the plays are shown to have been prompted by an acute memory of some personal experience which is then developed according to its own integral logic. In his methodology Pinter has consistently stressed the importance of starting with characters in a particular context, not beginning with an abstract theory or some allegorical meaning and thus avoiding the dangers of exhortation and prophecy.
"You arrange and you listen, following the clues you leave for yourself through the characters, and sometimes a balance is found where image can freely engender image and where at the same time you are able to keep your sights on the place where the characters are silent and in hiding. It is in the silence that they are most evident to me." This empirical approach to the writing suggests a similar approach to the directing of these texts. Of a character in The Birthday Party, Pinter remarked: "I knew everything about McCann after he walked through that door. I know nothing about him on the other side." Alan Ayckbourn playing Stanley in the same play with Pinter directing in the late 1950s innocently enquired of his character's background and was peremptorily told: "Mind your own fucking business. Concentrate on what's there."
None of this should lull us into thinking that there is anything improvised or ad hoc about the plays. Pinter is famously fastidious. Peter Hall averts to his tone of voice and rhythm of speech as revealing a precision of the spoken word which is absolute. To Michael Hordern he once complained: "I wrote dot, dot dot and you're giving me dot, dot." This may sound ridiculously pedantic until you consider that in the immaculately honed world of a Pinter play there could be the world of difference in playing that extra dot. Two dots, denoting the shorter pause, might indicate a character being casually evasive, thinking on his feet, while a three-dot pause could very well imply a premeditated lie.
My own encounter with this scrupulosity came in 1994 following a performance of my production of Betrayal at the Gate, when Pinter suggested that the lighting fade over the final tableau might be two seconds longer. Later he expanded on the request, saying that the last image is hard fought for and won and should not be so readily consigned to the darkness.
This anecdote reveals the showman in Pinter, a side of him often overlooked by those dazzled by his beautiful, limpid prose and consummate theatrical craftmanship. Pinter is always alive to what does and does not work on the stage for the audience. His instincts were honed in his early years as a repertory actor in the British regional theatre and around Ireland with Anew McMaster. From Wolfit and McMaster, the last great actor-managers, he learned how to "achieve moments of maximum intensity through silence and gesture." At the end of Oedipus at Colonus, "Wolfit was standing high up on the rostrum with all the light on him and a cloak around him ... and we all knew, the play demanded it, that Wolfit or Oedipus was going to turn and speak. He held the moment until one's stomach was truly trembling and the cloak came round; a tremendous swish which no one else has ever been able to achieve, I think. And the savagery and the power that emerged from such a moment was extraordinary.
In the attenuated and sexually charged world of a Pinter play, Ruth's prolonged holding of the glass under Lenny's nose in The Homecoming becomes the theatrical equivalent of Wolfit's cloak.
Billington provides an incisive and fascinating insight into the creative process of a profound and complex dramatist who has shaped and deepened our understanding of the nature of power and territory, dominance and subservience, resistance to authority, the politics of private relationships and the magic and mystery of women. It is a measure of the biographer's achievement in laying bare "the wholeness and unity of Pinter's imaginative world" that we, like him, are left in no doubt: that in Harold Pinter "we have one of the great dramatists, not just of our day, but of the century. Maybe of all time."