Yesterday’s news that Sir Harold Pinter has just added to his accomplishments by being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature received a blissful moment of the simultaneously absurd and embarrassing that could have been lifted from one of his plays, when – according to the Evening Standard – “A Sky News presenter announced at 12.01pm that Harold Pinter had died, before correcting herself, after a Pinteresque pause, and saying that he had in fact won a Nobel Prize”.
But then Pinter, who has just turned 75 this week and escaped a brush with death when he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus three and a half years ago, would have probably enjoyed the blunder. But the report also contains two words that are amongst his biggest legacy and also encumbrance: “Pinteresque pause”. He has long held such an iconic and distinctive place in British playwrighting history that the word Pintersque alone has come to define a particular type of play; but the alliterative addition of the word pause is something he’s widely credited as patenting.
It’s what is between the lines as much as in them that counts in a Pinter play, or even a Pintersque one that might be inspired by him; his plays are finely tuned models of trying to articulate the gaps between the spoken word and what people actually feel. His output lately, however, has been as sparse and minimalist as his dialogue can be, but after a playwrighting career that began nearly 50 years ago, he announced earlier this year that he is unlikely to write another: “I’ve written 29 plays. Isn’t that enough?”
Certainly that body of work continues to be produced widely, with a West End revival of one of his earliest plays, The Birthday Party, most recently seen again at the Duchess Theatre earlier this year, and Old Times revived at the Donmar last year. But he’s not given up the theatre entirely: only earlier this week, Ian Rickson announced that Pinter – who often acts in his own plays and sometimes directs the plays of others, notably Simon Gray – will return to the Royal Court as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations next year to appear in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.
The only honour that is overdue now is having a West End theatre named after him; but then, unlike on Broadway where theatres are re-named at the drop of a hat (and where the unlikely candidates for thus honouring include drama critics, a legendary newspaper caricaturist, and the current head of the Shubert Organisation who owns a big chunk of Broadway’s theatrical real estate), we are remarkably slow to rise to the occasion.
It is only now that Noel Coward and Ivor Novello, nearly 33 and 55 years after their respective deaths, that their names will finally be up in lights forever outside a West End theatre (the Albery and Strand respectively), and not just when one of their shows are playing there, though Novello hasn’t even had that honour for many years now. A few years ago there was talk of re-naming the Comedy Theatre for Pinter, after a series of his plays ran there; but it came to nothing. Isn’t it time to follow the Nobel lead and now honour him formally in the West End?
There's a wonderful line in today's Guardian from the man himself: "The chairman said 'You've won the Nobel Prize for Literature.' I was speechless and remained so for a couple of minutes."
Which is, of course, as it should be.