Audiences, readers, theatre critics, academics – overlapping categories –
have particular reasons for responding to and appreciating Pinter’s work,
and the man who writes, directs and performs it. There is no doubting the
recognition that Pinter attracts: international awards and honorary degrees
form part of that recognition; and you only need to be present at a Pinter
reading, for example at the second Pinter Festival in Dublin in 1997, to be
aware of the immediacy of response for a young audience. But Pinter also
seems to exist, in England at any rate, as a separate phenomenon, a special
construct labelled ‘Pinter’. This may be just a particular example of English
anti-intellectualism, in which journalists practise the time-honoured sport of
putting the boot in to anyone who is too successful, but especially anyone
who is successful in the ‘high’ arts of the theatre, or literature. This practice is
far less prevalent in the United States, or the rest of Europe. It may also
reflect another English trait, a distrust of anyone who is not a politician or a
political commentator yet who takes politics seriously, and is prepared to
shoot from the hip. Pinter has never shrunk from taking up causes, and from
acting, and speaking, publicly for what he believes to be right. His unequivocal
stance in recent years has ensured not just a high profile, but intermittent
sniper fire.
This collection of essays does not attempt to be exhaustive. A much larger
book would be necessary. A number of considerations informed the choice of
topics and authors. It centres on Pinter’s writing for the theatre, the most
enduring and accessible form of his writing, and also, by its nature, the most
open to reinterpretation. There are some inevitable gaps, for example in
Pinter’s writing specifically for radio or television, and this is partly deliberate,
since the performance aspect of those events is difficult to recapture,
unlike the relative accessibility of film. The writers include both academics
and theatre professionals (in any event not mutually exclusive categories),
and in many of the essays there is a strong explicit or implicit sense of the
performance dimension. The collection acknowledges the worldwide interest
in Pinter, with chapters on Pinter in specifically Russian and Irish contexts,
and by the inclusion of authors from the United States, Spain and Israel, as
well as from Ireland and the United Kingdom. Some of the essayists have been
writing on Pinter for many years, and attended the first productions of the
early plays; some have come to respond to his work comparatively recently.
We share a common enthusiasm, but not, I hope, an undiscriminating one.
One factor struck me, as editor: even where topics were quite tightly defined,
the writers tended to move, at some point, towards an overview, suggesting
that Pinter’s dramatic writing has, collectively, a strong coherence, a sense of
continuity and evolution, and forms a body of work that invites constant
re-evaluation. This collection seeks to offer one such set of perspectives.