Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter taught me how to write dialogue as opposed to conversation. There’s a brief scene in The Homecoming where one male character offers to take a glass of water from a female character, she declines in a simple direct way that shows she knows she is in control of more than the glass of water. It is dialogue with text and subtext as a power dynamic shifts.

Over the years I’ve directed One For The Road; The Servant; The Hothouse; The Homecoming. Turned out I had a good sensibility for the pacing of his plays, which I found to be much dinner that perhaps he intended. I’ve also seen various productions of The Homecoming & have a great film version of it as well.

He has done interesting things with narrative structure – in one play the events run from the climax to the on-set. In many of them there is sense of threat, sometimes unexplained. Motivation sometimes goes unexplained forcing the audience to participate in unfolding the plot for themselves. This has allowed me as a writer not to reveal but to intimate – the power of ambiguity. Not seeing the creature but hearing it is enough.

The language of his plays is never overly poetic, or intellectually obscure. He doesn’t go for punch-lines or for startling plot twists either. He doesn’t hesitate in making his characters suffer though – emotionally and physically.

In my staging I did bring my own gender spin. In The Hothouse I opted for a female head of the psychiatric facility – changing some of the sexual dynamic; I did the same for the Homecoming – having the professor daughter bring her new husband home to the family. The plays were structurally sound enough to support this challenging decision – though I was criticized for lack of respect. What the hell Shakespeare is now done with total gender & race blindness & it survives quite well. In fact such changes often charges the plays with layers of meaning that weren’t there in the original text or subtext.