Demolition Man.(Harold Pinter)(Interview)

On a grisly London evening last October, as the Victorian street lamps of Holland Park were flickering in the twilight, I arrived too early for an appointment at Harold Pinter's handsome town house. Pinter, who is seventy-seven, and who, for the past five years, has battled esophageal cancer and a rare skin disease that has twice brought him near death, had insisted that I come by, even though he'd been ill earlier in the week. "Better strike while the iron is hot," he'd said. I could see him through the high, arched window of his living room, parked in an armchair by the fire, almost sculptural. A walker was strategically positioned behind him. For decades a dynamo--the author of some thirty plays and two dozen screenplays, the director of more than twenty productions, and an influence on such dramatists as Heathcote Williams, Joe Orton, David Hare, and David Mamet--Pinter was winding down.

Over the years, Pinter's work has inspired a journal (The Pinter Review), added words to the English language (the Oxford English Dictionary lists "Pinteresque," "Pinterism," "Pinterian," and "Pinterishness" as acceptable terms), won dozens of awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2005, and made him an object of perpetual public fascination in Britain. (His recent performance in Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape," at the Royal Court--he began his career as an actor--sold out its entire run in sixteen minutes.) No other British playwright since Noel Coward has so dominated and defined the theatrical landscape of his time. Even Coward, who hated the New Wave that put him out of fashion, considered Pinter an exception. "Your writing absolutely fascinates me," he wrote to Pinter in 1965 after seeing his third full-length play, "The Homecoming." "You cheerfully break every rule of the theatre that I was brought up to believe in, except the cardinal one of never boring for a split-second. I love your choice of words, your resolute refusal to explain anything and the arrogant, but triumphant demands you make on the audience's imagination. I can well see why some clots hate it, but I belong to the opposite camp--if you will forgive the expression."

I leaned against a wall rereading "The Homecoming," which was what I'd come to discuss with Pinter and which was about to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of its debut on Broadway with a new production at the Cort Theatre (directed by Daniel Sullivan). The paperback copy of the play that I held in my hands had been purchased during the Broadway debut, at the Music Box, under the sensational direction of Peter Hall, in 1967. I'd seen the show on a Tuesday, bought the play at intermission, and returned to the Wednesday matinee to notate the blocking.

"The Homecoming" changed my life. Before the play, I thought words were just vessels of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defense. Before, I thought theatre was about the spoken; after, I understood the eloquence of the unspoken. The position of a chair, the length of a pause, the choice of a gesture, I realized, could convey volumes. In 1967, I didn't know quite what I'd seen; I knew only that the play's spectacular combination of mystery and rigor had taught me something new about life, about language, about the nature of dramatic storytelling. Pinter had taken the narration out of theatre: "The Homecoming" offered no explanations, no theory, no truths, no through line, no certainties of any kind. I was drawn to the charisma of the work in the same way that Pinter--I later learned--had been compelled by Shakespeare. "You are called upon to grapple with a perspective in which the horizon alternately collapses and re-forms behind you, in which the mind is subject to an intense diversity of atmospheric," he wrote in "A Note on Shakespeare," in 1950, six years before he started to do a similar thing with his own plays.

I was teaching night school when I first saw "The Homecoming," and I wanted to use the play in my class. I wrote to Pinter in care of the theatre. To my amazement, he replied. We met at Sam's, near the Music Box, on Forty-fifth Street. I was twenty-six. I had never met a playwright before. I couldn't have known then how frequently our paths would intersect over the decades: "The Homecoming" was the subject of my first book; for a few years in the early eighties, Pinter's son, Daniel Brand, from whom he is now estranged, was a tenant in my house; and my friend and downstairs neighbor in London, the director Karel Reisz, was probably the best interpreter of Pinter's later plays and the director of one of Pinter's best screen adaptations, "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981). While Reisz and Pinter were working on their screenplay, Pinter's silver Mercedes convertible was often parked outside our house. Once, just before a work session, my wife and our four-year-old son, Chris, sat at Reisz's kitchen table with Pinter as he held forth in his ...