Obsessed with Pinter

It’s the size of a Hackney bedsit but the ambience is cosily expensive. Sonia Friedman’s tiny office above the Duke of York’s Theatre in St Martin’s Lane has warm, pinkish lighting and elegant armchairs with thick, deep cushions. The dark wallpaper is obscured by framed posters of hit West End shows. Sprawled across the sofa there’s a touch of pure kitsch: a six-year-old poodle, snuffling and dozing, whose fluffy white forelegs are sheathed in the armlets of a scarlet tank top. His name is Teddy and he looks like the victim of a stag-night prank contentedly sleeping off his hangover.

Opposite me sits Sonia Friedman — pretty, blonde, in her mid-40s — who occupies a formidable position as one of the West End’s leading producers. We have no specific subject to discuss but Harold Pinter crops up almost immediately.

‘I’ve been obsessed with his work ever since I started to study plays,’ she says. In her early 20s, as a stage manager at the National Theatre, she was attached to a production Pinter was directing. Her job was to annotate his notes. ‘One day, he leaned across and said to me, “I think we need a pause there.”’ That night, she rushed home and telephoned all her friends. ‘Guess what! Harold Pinter asked me to write “pause”.’

She got to know him better when she began staging his work in the West End. In 2007, she produced The Dumb Waiter starring Lee Evans and Jason Isaacs. The following year her production of No Man’s Land, starring Michael Gambon, drew this accolade from Pinter. ‘It is the definitive production.’ By then he was entering the final stages of his terminal illness and he asked Gambon to read a speech from the play at his funeral.