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| Pinter owed it all to a fledgling
theatre |
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James Roose-Evans
Harold Pinter
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HAROLD Pinter, who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature,
made his breakthrough as a playwright thanks to the fledgling Hampstead
Theatre Club.
His then unknown one-act plays, The Dumb Waiter and The Room, were
a double bill presented by the newly-formed Hampstead Theatre Club
in its very first season at the Moreland Hall, in Hollybush Vale,
in 1959.
“Up till then The Birthday Party was Pinter’s only play
to be produced and it came off after just a week at the Lyric, Hammersmith,
because it was thumped by the critics,” James Roose-Evans,
the Theatre Club’s founder, now 77, told me at his home in
Belsize Park Gardens, Hampstead.
“That first Pinter double-bill put him and the Theatre Club
on the theatrical map. It was a really momentous event that ought
not to be forgotten.”
It was the presence of the formidable critic Harold Hobson at the
Moreland Hall that played the vital role in what turned out to be
a double triumph, Roose-Evans directing The Dumb Waiter and Pinter
himself directing The Room.
“What worries me about Mr Pinter is why his plays do not come
to the West End,” wrote Hobson in his Sunday Times review.
“It is a matter of astonishment to me how both the English
Stage Company and the Arts Theatre, which can recognise a molehill
at five hundred yards’ distance, have overlooked this mountain.
“If you want to see The Room or The Dumb Waiter, you have to
go to the Hampstead Theatre Club and not to the West End. The performances
are crowded. Gone is the hostility which, in a moment of collective
madness, greeted The Birthday Party.
“If the Hampstead Theatre Club keeps up this standard it will
not only deserves success, it will command it.”
And so it did over the following decades, when it transferred to
Swiss Cottage and became the renowned Hampstead Theatre of today.
Roose-Evans first heard of The Dumb Waiter through the actor Walter
Hudd, a supporter of the Theatre Club, and went to meet Pinter in
a pub. “He was an actor and that is where his fine ear for
dialogue comes from,” he said.
“He had a quiet intensity about him and from the moment I read
The Dumb Waiter I found it intensely exciting. It was a play which
catches you with its wonderful humour and sense of menace.”
The result of the Hampstead production of the two plays was that
they then transferred to the Royal Court, in Chelsea, and Pinter
– plus his famous pauses – became an inherent part of
20th-century theatre.
Roose-Evans remembers how the Cockney caretaker at the Moreland
Hall, who was not always co-operative, watched the one run-through
that The Room had there before the curtain went up for the public.
“He stood at the back of the hall, obviously riveted to the
spot,” recalled Roose-Evans. “And he said to me at the
end, ‘The little chap got bumped off because he asked too many
questions.’
“He got it in one. Yet when all the Chelsea set poured in to
see the play later they spent hours discussing between themselves
what they thought its meaning was. And were never quite sure.”
Organise or die, says the movie master
Loach
YOU can say what you want about Ken Loach but you can’t
deny he’s stayed the course.
At a discussion after a screening of his 1996 film, Carla’s
Song at the ICA on Monday, the director (pictured), who lives in
Grove Terrace, Kentish Town, was keen to stress the importance of
political commitment.
Citing his support of Respect, the coalition of unions, peace campaigners
and Muslim groups, he described the current political and artistic
scene in Britain as “like Berlin in the 1930s; there was wonderful
satire and cabaret but Hitler still became leader – and for
all the nasty things people say about him now, we still have the
liar who took us to war as our Prime Minister”.
He concluded: “Art is wonderful but if you don’t organise,
you’re dead.”
Those of us who have to sit through more than our fair share of
council meetings hoped this might be a coded message that he may
be prepared to stand for Respect in next year’s elections to
the Town Hall.
Alas, Ken told me: “I don’t have the time, I’m too
busy making films.”
The council chamber’s loss is the cinema’s gain.
Robert Fisk – the racist?
I NEVER thought I’d hear that extraordinary campaigning
reporter Robert Fisk call himself a racist.
But that’s what he called himself at the ICA on Saturday.
Everybody is supposed to remember where they were on September 11,
2001.
Fisk (pictured) was on a plane coming back from the Middle East
heading for Heathrow. On hearing the news he walked around the plane
with a friend picking out suspicious passengers.
“We went looking for suspicious characters we didn’t like
the look of”, he told a packed audience.
He said: “We came back and swapped profiles. Who would have
thought it? Liberal Fisk turned into a racist in a minute? That’s
the power of terrorism.”
Fisk, the Independent’s Middle East correspondent, helped to
lead a discussion on the politics and morality of suicide bombing
after a film by documentary maker Kevin Toolis, The Cult of the
Suicide Bomber, had been shown.
In this frightening film there’s a scene showing a mother happily
signing a letter of consent for her 14-year-old son to blow himself
up.
“It is hard to comprehend,” says Toolis, “but that
is its power – it is all about sending a message.”
It’s painting by numbers in the
health service
THE Queen – as the old joke goes – must think every
hospital smells of fresh paint.
Now, it seems, New Labour health ministers must struggle under
the same misapprehension.
When the new Secretary of State Patricia Hewitt ‘opened’
the Highgate Health Centre on Tuesday (it’s been there a
year, folks), she will have been impressed by the new coat of
paint applied to corridor walls.
According to Dr Susannah Fairweather, a junior at the Dartmouth
Park Hill centre, there was a flurry of activity on the eve of
Ms Hewitt’s visit; the newly laid lawns and neatly trimmed
privet hedges contrasting starkly with the conditions in the doctors’
office, where books are stacked on “wonky cardboard shelving”
and the talk is of cuts to medical and nursing staff.
In a letter in yesterday’s Independent, Dr Fairweather asks,
not unreasonably, whether “those wasted pounds would have
been better spent elsewhere?”
Hospital chiefs deny there have been any cuts and say the cost
of the decorating work was covered by a “fixed service level
agreement”.
So that’s all right then. But next time a health minister’s
description of NHS services doesn’t chime with your own experience,
you’ll know why. Pictured Patricia Hewitt with Camden’s
mental health boss Erville Millar.
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Give power to the people
POST-war, early 1950s Britain was still experiencing food rationing
and was a disillusioning place for English gourmands. The war had
destroyed the restaurant trade and, with few exceptions, post-war
eateries made the worst of a bad situation.
FULL STORY
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