Last week the Oxford Literary Festival screened BBC Arena’s recording of the National Theatre Tribute to Harold Pinter. Towards the end of the film Colin Firth gives Aston’s speech from The Caretaker. Hunkered down in a centre-stage armchair, Aston recalls being forcibly electrocuted by doctors in a mental institution. His speech is clear but halting, partly from the effort of joining his broken thoughts together, partly from remembering terrible events.
The lines are virtually uninflected. No self-pity. No sudden movements. No discernible ‘acting’. The power of the speech lies in its economy. The tension between what is and is not said vibrates with a seismic emotional power that never breaks the surface of Aston’s immense dignity.
It was recently rumoured that Firth might soon appear in a London production of a Pinter play. So far this has proved untrue, which is a pity, because he is a Pinter actor of the highest class. Before the NT’s Tribute (one run-through, no rehearsal), Firth probably hadn’t looked at the speech since being directed in the part by Pinter almost 20 years earlier. Yet in the silence between sitting and speaking, picked out by light on the vastness of the Olivier stage, Aston appeared.
Fortunate actors very occasionally experience a combination of personnel and material that generates a collaborative openness in which something can really happen. Nothing is quite the same after working in such an atmosphere, and the sheer intensity of concentration in Harold Pinter’s rehearsal room compelled actors to grow. It certainly changed the game for me as a young actor.
Working with Pinter was literally an educational experience: an actor’s innate potential was activated under his leadership. It permanently altered my perception of the creative process, and sharpened an appetite for further experiences of similar intensity.
Perhaps Colin Firth’s time with Harold on The Caretaker gave him something similar. Certainly they remained friends for the remainder of the playwright’s life. Watching Firth briefly re-animate Aston, it was as though somewhere mysterious in the body, held in the cells, an essential, living image is stored. The image waits to be given new life, as a hologram is visible only when activated by laser-light.
I don’t act now, but like many actors, it was a formative onstage experience of great intensity that lit the pilot flame of a serious desire to perform. Experiencing the onstage shift that can sometimes occur between time and timelessness is an astounding awakening. That intensity can be addictive. If he or she is lucky, an actor will taste it a few times in a career, enough to keep them coming back, eternally hopeful, more often than not disappointed.
Working with Harold, no one was ever disappointed. Baffled, possibly. Witness a young actor named Alan Ayckbourn, who acted in The Birthday Party’s second production in 1959, directed by the author. Ayckbourn tells how the perplexed cast took Pinter to a pub one lunch-time to grill him about their characters. But before Harold could shed any light on anything, a distressed man ran into the pub and recounted a bizarre tale about having stuffed his mother-in-law up the chimney, where she remained, possibly dead. It rapidly dawned on the actors that Pinter’s strange and disturbing play was a lot less abstract than they had assumed.
They were witnesses to the phenomenon that Harold’s everyday experience involved attracting weird stuff. Nevertheless, the actors were still pretty baffled when the time came to go out in front of an audience. Only when the play was done, applause in their ears, did they fully understand what Harold had known all along.
It’s natural that actors sometimes need an audience to confirm what a director has been asking them to accept on trust. But Harold, for whom it was anathema to theorise about what he regarded as purely instinctive processes, was hardly backward in offering assistance. We have, for example, these illuminating words, jotted down by an assistant as Pinter uttered them in a 1964 rehearsal room:
“If you hit a line with a particular emphasis – within the rhythm – its meaning will become apparent. Listen to the sound first and the meaning will become clear through that. Music and rhythm: they must be your guides.”
Harold believed that the theatre has no right to be dull. His peak experiences as a young actor, joyously touring Shakespeare in rural Ireland with Anew McMaster, gave him a practical knowledge of what would shut an audience up. ‘It was either them or us.’ In other words, he felt a duty to generate the highest possible stakes.
For many actors, the experience of working with Pinter was their peak experience. Kenneth Cranham, one of Harold’s favourite actors, says that while an earlier generation revered Olivier and Noel Coward as their theatrical masters, his knew only one – and that was Harold.
A couple of months before he died, Harold asked me to edit his letters. Among the earliest in his archive are several to his literary hero, Henry Miller. Opening Tropic of Cancer, Harold’s 18-year-old mind was blown wide open on page one:
“The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero then is not Time, but Timelessness.”
Miller’s ruthless, remorseless commitment to making something happen in his allotted span burned into Harold’s consciousness. It was already seared in his soul.
He may not always have succeeded, but everything Pinter attempted creatively was and remains an heroic defiance of the chronological curse, a quest for the timeless and eternal present in which there is no death, and where life is never dull.
Harry Burton is editing a volume of Harold Pinter’s selected letters for Faber and Faber. Harry would very much like to hear from anyone with correspondence from Harold Pinter. Write to: Pinter Letters, P.O. Box 67011, London W12 2DF.
Harry is also the director of Working With Pinter, a film on the playwright that was called ‘an outstanding documentary’ by The Observer. It is published by Illuminations.
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