It’s a bird.
It’s a plane.
It’s your daily dose of London.
Top of the morning to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are.
Are you ready?
Here we go.
Imagine being so good at saying nothing that they give you the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Well, that’s not quite fair.
But it’s not entirely unfair either.
Because today’s Londoner made an art form out of silence.
Out of hesitation.
Out of the things people don’t say.
And, perhaps most importantly, out of the things people say when they’re trying very hard not to say something else.
His name?
Harold Pinter.
Born on this day, October 10th, 1930.
Ninety-six years ago today.
And what a Londoner.
Not just somebody who happened to be born here.
London was in his bloodstream. In his imagination. In the way he heard people speak. In the way he understood fear, danger, power, friendship.
And silence.
Especially silence.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Let’s go back to the beginning.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
And today we’re off to Hackney.
October 10th, 1930.
A baby boy is born at Tudor House, Newington Green.
Harold Pinter.
His father, Jack, was a ladies’ tailor.
His mother was Frances Moskowitz.
And the family story is a very London story.
Two grandfathers.
Both arriving in London in 1900.
One from Russian Poland, fleeing the pogroms.
The other from Odessa.
Eastern European Jews, bringing with them their culture, their memories, their determination to make a life in a new country.
And thirty years later, here’s Harold.
An only child.
Growing up in Thistlewaite Road, Hackney.
Now, I want you to picture something.
A garden.
A lilac tree.
And underneath it, an eight-year-old boy.
All by himself.
Except he isn’t really by himself.
He’s talking.
Having conversations.
With people who aren’t there.
Imaginary friends.
And he’s not just talking to them. He’s listening to what they have to say.
I mean, come on.
If you were casting around for a childhood scene that might give you an inkling of the great playwright to come, you’d be hard put to find a better one.
A little boy in a Hackney garden, inventing characters and conducting conversations with them.
The theatre of the imagination.
And he hasn’t even reached his ninth birthday.
But something rather less agreeable is coming his way.
War.
In 1939, Harold is evacuated to Cornwall.
Away from London.
Away from his parents.
Away from everything familiar.
He’s desperately lonely.
A year later he comes home.
And what does he come home to?
The Blitz.
Bombs.
Fire.
Buildings coming down.
People being killed.
And the knowledge that you might go to bed tonight and not be here tomorrow morning.
Pinter never forgot that feeling.
The precariousness of life.
The sense that the world you think you know, the world you feel safe in, can suddenly turn on you.
And all the while, the boy is reading.
Good heavens, is he reading.
Hackney Public Library.
He practically devours the place.
Dostoyevsky.
Virginia Woolf.
D. H. Lawrence.
T. S. Eliot.
Ernest Hemingway.
Not exactly lightweight reading for a schoolboy.
And then comes Hackney Downs Grammar School.
And one of those extraordinary teachers who changes a life.
Joe Brearley.
An English teacher.
A lover of poetry.
A lover of the theatre.
And a man who sees something in young Harold.
He casts him as Romeo.
Then Macbeth.
And here’s another scene I’d love to have witnessed.
The two of them out walking.
Through Hackney.
Teacher and pupil.
And as they walk, Joe Brearley declaims passages from the plays of John Webster.
Webster!
The great Jacobean dramatist.
Murder. Revenge. Treachery. Poison. Corruption.
All that glorious, blood-soaked seventeenth-century theatre.
Being declaimed as two figures make their way through the streets of Hackney.
What a picture.
What an education.
And here’s a surprise.
Harold Pinter was a seriously good athlete.
A sprinter.
He set the school record for the hundred yards.
Yes, really.
The man who became famous for the pause was once the fastest boy in the school.
There’s a delicious irony for you.
But there was another education going on.
Outside the classroom.
On the streets.
And this one was considerably more dangerous.
Pinter’s teenage friends were mostly Jewish.
Bright boys.
Bookish boys.
Boys who loved literature, music, films, argument.
They’d debate Bach and Beethoven.
They’d discuss the latest European films.
They’d talk books.
And they’d remain friends for life.
But this was the East End in the years immediately after the Second World War.
And fascism hadn’t gone away.
Far from it.
There were fascists on the streets.
Antisemitism.
Threats.
Confrontations.
And sometimes violence.
Now, put yourself in young Harold’s shoes.
You’re Jewish.
You’re walking through Hackney.
You encounter a group of men looking for trouble.
What do you do?
Well, one thing you learn to do is talk.
Carefully.
You learn how to evade a question.
How to give an answer that isn’t quite an answer.
How to turn a conversation.
How to keep somebody guessing.
How to buy yourself time.
Because sometimes the wrong word can get you into very serious trouble.
And the right word can get you out of it.
And suddenly, don’t you see, we’re getting very close to the world of Harold Pinter.
The world of his plays.
Where apparently ordinary conversations can become contests.
Where a question can be a threat.
Where an answer can be a defence.
Where people use words to establish who’s in charge.
Who has the upper hand.
Who’s frightened.
And who’s doing the frightening.
And sometimes the most frightening thing of all is what nobody says.
Now, another little episode.
Pinter turns eighteen.
He gets his National Service call-up papers.
And refuses to serve.
Conscientious objector.
He’s hauled before military tribunals.
Twice.
Then before a civil magistrate.
Twice.
He thinks he’s going to prison.
Instead he’s fined.
His father pays the fines.
But what really gets under Pinter’s skin is the bureaucracy.
The absurdity of it.
Statements he never made are officially attributed to him.
Words put into his mouth.
And he comes away with his already considerable suspicion of authority thoroughly reinforced.
“I really smelled a rat,” he said later.
And then, acting.
He goes to RADA.
Hates it.
Moves on to the Central School of Speech and Drama.
And in 1951 joins the company of an Irish actor-manager named Anew McMaster.
Known to everybody as Mac.
Now, Mac was quite a character.
A grand old theatrical figure.
And Pinter learned an enormous amount from him.
He played Shakespeare.
Bassanio.
Macduff.
Iago.
Even Hamlet.
Just once.
A matinée.
Afterwards Mac delivered his verdict.
“Very good. But next time be a bit nicer to your mother.”
Wonderful.
But there was something else Mac could do.
Something that fascinated Pinter.
He could take a noisy audience.
A restless audience.
People coughing, whispering, fidgeting.
And silence them.
With a single word.
One word.
Delivered at precisely the right moment.
Given precisely the right weight.
And the whole audience would go quiet.
Pinter was watching.
Listening.
Learning.
Because words weren’t just words.
They had weight.
They had timing.
They had power.
And so did the spaces between them.
Now, for much of the 1950s, Pinter was a jobbing actor.
Touring repertory theatres.
One town after another.
One play after another.
Living in fairly dreadful digs.
Often playing sinister characters.
And using a stage name.
David Baron.
But all the while he was writing.
Poems.
Prose.
A novel.
And then, in 1956, something happened.
An old Hackney friend, Henry Woolf, was doing postgraduate work at Bristol University.
He asked Pinter to write a play for the university drama department.
Pinter said yes.
And wrote The Room.
In four days and four nights.
Four days!
And what did he write about?
A room.
A woman living in it.
Her largely silent husband.
And people who keep coming to the door.
People who come into the room.
People who may or may not mean harm.
People whose intentions aren’t clear.
And the atmosphere gets more and more unsettling.
More and more threatening.
And there it is.
The Pinter world.
Almost fully formed.
A room.
A door.
Somebody outside.
Somebody inside.
And you’re not at all sure which side of that door is safer.
The following year he writes The Birthday Party.
It opens at the Lyric Hammersmith in May 1958.
And gets absolutely slaughtered.
The critics hate it.
They don’t understand it.
They don’t like the fact that Pinter won’t explain everything.
Who are these mysterious men?
What organisation do they represent?
Why won’t the playwright tell us?
The play closes at the end of the week.
Just imagine.
You’ve staked everything on this play.
Turned down a well-paid acting job.
And six days later, curtains.
Literally.
But Pinter doesn’t give up.
And two years later comes The Caretaker.
Three men.
A shabby room in west London.
A homeless tramp.
Two brothers.
And a constant, shifting struggle for power.
Who belongs here?
Who doesn’t?
Who gets to stay?
Who gets thrown out?
Who’s telling the truth?
Who’s lying?
This time the critics get it.
The audiences get it.
Or perhaps, and I rather like this way of looking at it, Pinter has taught them how to listen to him.
The Caretaker transfers to the West End.
Runs for 444 performances.
And Harold Pinter has arrived.
Properly arrived.
Before long his name becomes an adjective.
Pinteresque.
Think about that.
Not many writers manage to get their names into the language.
Shakespearean.
Dickensian.
Kafkaesque.
And now Pinteresque.
That extraordinary mixture of everyday conversation, menace, comedy, uncertainty and silence.
Especially silence.
And there’s a lovely story about that.
Pinter is working with the great actor Michael Hordern.
And he gives him a note about a pause.
A very particular pause.
Pinter says:
“I wrote dot, dot, dot and you’re giving me dot, dot.”
And Hordern understands immediately.
Of course he does.
Because in Pinter a pause isn’t nothing.
It’s something.
It has duration.
It has weight.
It has meaning.
A pause can be threatening.
A pause can be evasive.
A pause can be funny.
A pause can be heartbreaking.
And a pause can change who has the power in the room.
Now, I don’t want to turn this into a roll call of great plays.
There are too many of them.
The Homecoming.
Old Times.
No Man’s Land.
Betrayal.
And then there are the films.
The Servant.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
And all the directing.
And the acting.
And the poetry.
And the politics.
Because Pinter was never a man who kept his opinions to himself.
He was a ferocious critic of abuses of power.
Of political dishonesty.
Of torture.
Of governments that lied.
And he was prepared to make himself extremely unpopular by saying so.
There’s a direct line, I think, from the Jewish boy facing fascists on the streets of post-war Hackney to the elderly playwright denouncing the powerful.
He’d spent a lifetime thinking about what happens when one person has power over another.
And what happens when language is used to disguise that power.
In 2005 came the ultimate recognition.
The Nobel Prize for Literature.
Pinter was seventy-five.
And very ill.
Too ill to travel to Stockholm to deliver his Nobel lecture.
So he recorded it.
Its title?
Art, Truth and Politics.
And the subject?
Truth.
Lies.
The way language can be used to conceal reality.
The way power can manipulate what people believe.
The same preoccupations, in a sense, that had been there from the beginning.
From Hackney.
From the Blitz.
From the confrontations with fascists.
From the lessons learned in the theatre.
From those rooms where nobody quite says what they mean.
Harold Pinter died in London on Christmas Eve 2008.
He was seventy-eight.
He’s buried at Kensal Green Cemetery.
And I want to finish by taking you back to Hackney.
Back to Thistlewaite Road.
Back to that garden.
Back to the lilac tree.
There’s a little boy sitting underneath it.
He’s eight years old.
He’s having conversations with people who aren’t there.
He doesn’t know about Nobel Prizes.
He doesn’t know about the West End.
He doesn’t know that one day his name will become an adjective.
He doesn’t know that audiences all over the world will sit in darkened theatres, hanging on his every word.
And sometimes hanging on the absence of a word.
He’s just a little boy in a London garden.
Talking.
Listening.
Imagining.
And learning, perhaps without knowing it, that what people don’t say can be every bit as interesting as what they do.
And that’s our Londoner for today.
Harold Pinter.
Born October 10th, 1930.
A Hackney boy who changed the sound of the theatre.
And taught the world to listen to silence.
Happy birthday, Harold.
And on that note…
Well, perhaps we should have a pause.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.