Category Archives: History

Power to the People: Pinter, Amateur Performance and the Questors Theatre

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There can be little doubt that Pinter’s professional career benefitted hugely from the commercial theatre sector in the West End and Broadway, from state-subsidised organisations like the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, or public broadcasting services like the BBC. One of the primary aims of the Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies project is to trace, chart, archive and contextualise every professional production of Harold Pinter’s plays in the … Continue reading →

Happy Birthday, Harold: Pinter at the Pinter’s Memento Mori

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On Wednesday the 10th of October 2018, Harold Pinter would have turned 88. 10 years after his death, the Jamie Lloyd Company (the team behind the unprecedented Pinter at the Pinter season currently running at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End until February 2019) gathered together an all-star cast of performers to celebrate his legacy in a one-off gala event, Happy Birthday, Harold. Framing the event as a birthday – … Continue reading →

Reflections on the ‘Pinter on Film, Television and Radio’ conference, 19-20 September 2018

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The University of Reading arm of the Pinter Histories and Legacies project—peopled by Professor Jonathan Bignell, Dr Billy Smart and Dr Amanda Wrigley—were thrilled to welcome project colleagues and an international group of academic friends old and new from an exciting range of disciplines to the University of Reading’s Minghella Studies, the home of the Film, Theatre and Television Department, on 19 September 2018 for the first day of the … Continue reading →

Harold Pinter at the RSC (Part 2): Reflections on the Archive

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One of the consistent pleasures of research into the production histories of Pinter’s theatrical work for this project has been the opportunity to learn from and work with the archivists and librarians at different institutions that hold rich and varied material connected with Pinter’s expansive career. Of course, as with any research strategy – particularly those engaged in revisiting or reassessing traces of past performances – archival research is not … Continue reading →

The Lover (Associated-Rediffusion for ITV, 1963): ‘tough stuff, well acted and cleverly directed’

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By the time The Lover was broadcast by ITV on 28 March 1963, Pinter was, as his biographer Michael Billington puts it, ‘in contemporary jargon, “hot” ’ (The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, Faber, 2007, p. 142). So, too, was its producer Joan Kemp-Welch (1906-1999), at least within the television industry. The dramatic narrative itself, based on the erotic role-play of a suburban middle-class married couple (played by Vivien … Continue reading →

The Fact of Pinter

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To open his keynote speech for the Staging Pinter conference at Birmingham, playwright and lecturer Steve Waters declared that ‘Pinter is such a fact for all of us.’ The presentations and interaction that transpired over Friday and Saturday demonstrated, explored and even interrogated the fact that Pinter ‘is such a fact.’ The demographic of delegates was international: with parts of Europe, the Middle East, North America and Great Britain represented and … Continue reading →

A Dialogued Review: Ian Rickson’s ‘The Birthday Party’ 2018

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The following dialogue explores the recent production of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, which is playing at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End from 9 January to 14 April 2018. The production is directed by Ian Rickson and stars Peter Wight as Petey, Zoë Wannamaker as Meg, Toby Jones as Stanley, Pearl Mackie as Lulu, Stephen Mangan as Goldberg and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as McCann. Set design is by … Continue reading →

Brian Blessed and Pinter’s The Room: a real knock-out

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‘Shouting? Swearing? Threats? Menacing looks? I know what you’re thinking: it sounds just like a Harold Pinter play!’ Brian Blessed, Absolute Pandemonium: My Louder than Life Story (London: Pan Books, 2015), p. 77. As the Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies team prepare for the holiday season, what better time to reflect on some of the more surprising finds and amusing anecdotes we’ve come across? In his 2015 autobiography, Absolute Pandemonium, … Continue reading →

Pinter Goes West: Betrayal at Salisbury Playhouse & The Caretaker at Bristol Old Vic

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In the run-up to the tenth anniversary since Harold Pinter’s death, theatre audiences in the West of England have had the opportunity to see both early and late middle period work with The Caretaker at Bristol Old Vic and Betrayal at Salisbury Playhouse. The two young directors (Christopher Haydon and Jo Newman), have succeeded in refreshing these two repertoire favourites. Past Pinter productions haunted me on the train journey to … Continue reading →

The Peartaker: Pinter, Rudkin, and the Midlands

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This is the shine, the powder and blood, and here am I, Straddled, exile always in one Whitbread Ale town, Or such. Pinter, New Year in the Midlands (1950) ‘[I]n this gaudy, bawd-filled Midlands pub one even wonders if there is a glimpse of Pinter himself in “the clamping/ Red shirted boy ragefull, thudding his cage.”’ Billington, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (1996) Ahead of the project’s first … Continue reading →