Harold Pinter (1930-2008): tributes paid to Nobel prize-winning writer
TRIBUTES HAVE poured in for Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter who died aged 78 on Christmas Eve from cancer.
Gate theatre director Michael Colgan said Pinter was one of the foremost playwrights of his generations.
“The first thing I’d like to say about Harold was that he was my friend. He started as someone I was in awe of and became a very good friend.”
Pinter had a particular affinity with Ireland and the Gate Theatre, he said. “He was part of the triumvirate of great playwrights – Beckett, Pinter and Friel – it’s very sad to have lost two of them now.”
Pinter found an appreciation in Ireland before anywhere else, Mr Colgan said. “The Gate, more than any other theatre over the last 20 years has been a real home for him. It was really upsetting that he wasn’t properly appreciated in his own place.”
The Gate held a festival of his work in 2005 to coincide with his 75th birthday and plans to hold another in 2010.
Pinter’s second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, said: “He was a great, and it was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years. He will never be forgotten.” Pinter’s play No Man’s Land will be performed tonight for the first time since his death.
A cast including Sir Michael Gambon, David Walliams and David Bradley will go on stage at the Duke of York’s theatre in London for their latest performance at 7.30pm.
Bradley said: “I’m very honoured to have known him personally and professionally over the last 10 years. It’s a huge loss.
“He wrote about oppression and people taking terrible advantage and oppressing each other on a personal level.”
The writer was well-known for his left-wing political views and was a critic of US and UK foreign policy, voicing opposition on a number of issues, including the bombing of Afghanistan in 2001.
Veteran politician Tony Benn said: “Harold Pinter was a great playwright and a great figure on the political scene. His death will leave a huge gap that will be felt by the whole political spectrum.”
Comedian Bill Bailey, who appeared in the collection of sketches Pinter’s People, said: “He really ushered in a whole new era of drama – it didn’t have to have a neat ending or even make sense, it conveyed a sense of feeling, an air of menace, you don’t know why, and that inspired a new generation.
“As a comic I was drawn to the brilliant way he was able to catch the idiosyncrasies of comic speech, and that ability to incorporate that into something that was drama, it was meant to be high art and it was incredibly funny.”
BBC creative director Alan Yentob said: “He was a unique figure in British theatre. He has dominated the theatre scene since the 1950s.”
Sunday Telegraph theatre critic Tim Walker said: “This was a man who had plays with long silences, where characters did not always go anywhere – very much like real life. He brought a realism to the business.”
Pinter was born in Hackney in 1930, the only son of immigrant Jews. He began writing for the stage in the mid-1950s and The Room was published in 1957. His second full-length play, The Caretaker (1960), secured his reputation as one of the country’s foremost dramatists and playwrights.
Poetic dramatist turned champion of human rights: page 12
