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 →
Lately, as part of my research for the Pinter Histories and Legacies project, I’ve been leafing through Pinter’s scrapbooks in the British Library. Two weeks ago I ran into some materials on various productions of Pinter’s play One for the Road, from 1984. This caught my attention because most of my work on Pinter has focused on his shift after the 1970s into a more explicitly political register. In one … Continue reading →
The Pinter: Histories and Legacies team were saddened to learn earlier this week of the death of Sir Peter Hall. Without any doubt, Hall was the most important figure in post-war twentieth-century British theatre, a director and visionary whose own history is a map of that period, and whose legacies are interwoven into the fabric of the British cultural landscape. He modernised the British theatre, elevated the role and artistry … Continue reading →
Harold Pinter’s affiliation with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), the impact of the works he produced there, and his artistic relationship with its founding director Peter Hall are typically discussed in relation to early seminal productions such as The Collection (1962), The Homecoming (1965) or Old Times (1971). These mainstage productions at the Aldwych Theatre – the RSC’s first London base from 1961 to 1983 – have become canonical both … Continue reading →
The first order of business for the Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies project is to develop a database for registering every major production in the United Kingdom, from 1957 to 2017, of Harold Pinter’s plays, screenplays, television and radio dramas. As our team beavers away, reviewing and tweaking the conceptual design of the database and anticipating its completion, we’re all engaged in various projects and tasks relevant to both the … Continue reading →
Sixty years ago, Harold Pinter’s first play The Room was performed in a converted squash court at the University of Bristol. Pinter’s school chum Henry Woolf was studying drama there in one of the first postgraduate cohorts of the first University drama department in the country, and asked if Pinter were able to supply a play for him to produce on his course. Pinter had previously told Woolf of his … Continue reading →
