Complete Works: Four
Volume Four of the Collected Works of Harold Pinter
By the same author
PLAYS
Ashes to Ashes · Betrayal · The Birthday Party · The Caretaker · Celebration and the Room · The Collection and the Lover · The Homecoming · The Hothouse · Landscape and Silence · Mountain Language · Moonlight · No Man’s Land · Old Times · One For The Road · Other Places (A Kind of Alaska, Victoria Station, Family Voices) · Party Time · Remembrance of Things Past (with Di Trevis) · The Room and the Dumb Waiter · A Slight Ache and Other Plays · Tea Party and Other Plays
Plays One
(The Birthday Party, The Room, The Dumb Waiter, A Slight Ache, The Hothouse, A Night Out, “The Black and White,” “The Examination”)
Plays Two
(The Caretaker, The Dwarfs, The Collection, The Lover, Night School, Trouble in the Works, The Black and White, Request Stop, Last to Go, Special Offer)
Plays Three
(The Homecoming, Tea Party, The Basement, Landscape, Silence, Night, That’s Your Trouble, That’s All, Applicant, Interview, Dialogue for Three, “Tea Party,” Old Times, No Man’s Land)
Plays Four
(Betrayal, Monologue, One for the Road, Mountain Language, Family Voices, A Kind of Alaska, Victoria Station, Precisely, The New World Order, Party Time, Moonlight, Ashes to Ashes, Celebration, Umbrellas, God’s District, Apart from That)
SCREENPLAYS
Harold Pinter Collected Screenplays One
(The Servant, The Pumpkin Eater, The Quiller Memorandum, Accident, The Last Tycoon, Langrishe, Go Down)
Harold Pinter Collected Screenplays Two
(The Go-Between, The Proust Screenplay, Victory, Turtle Diary, Reunion)
Harold Pinter Collected Screenplays Three
(The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Heat of the Day, The Comfort of Strangers, The Trial, The Dreaming Child)
PROSE, POETRY AND POLITICS
The Dwarfs (a novel)
100 Poems by 100 Poets (an anthology)
99 Poems in Translation (an anthology)
Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948–2005
War
HAROLD PINTER
Complete Works: Four
OLD TIMES
NO MAN’S LAND
BETRAYAL
MONOLOGUE
FAMILY VOICES
With an introduction by the author
Grove Press
New York
This collection copyright © 1981 by Neabar Investments Ltd.
Old Times copyright © 1971 by FPinter Limited
No Man’s Land copyright © 1975 by FPinter Limited
Betrayal copyright © 1978, 1980 by FPinter Limited
Monologue copyright © 1973 by Fraser52 Limited
Family Voices copyright © 1981 by Neabar Investments Ltd.
“Speech at Hamburg” (Introduction) copyright © 1970 by FPinter Limited
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ISBN 978-0-8021-5050-9
eISBN 978-0-8021-9226-4
CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that these plays are subject to a royalty. It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and all British Commonwealth countries, and all countries covered by the International Copyright Union, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, and the Universal Copyright Convention. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.
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Grove Press
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CONTENTS
Chronology
Introduction
Old Times
No Man’s Land
Betrayal
Monologue
Family Voices
HAROLD PINTER: A CHRONOLOGY
Year of writing
First performance
1949
Kullus
(short story)
1952–6
The Dwarfs
(novel)
1953
Latest Reports From the Stock Exchange
(short story)
1954–5
The Black and White
(short story)
1955
The Examination
(short story)
1957
The Room
May 15, 1957
1957
The Birthday Party
April 28, 1958
1957
The Dumb Waiter
January 21, 1960
1958
A Slight Ache
July 29, 1959
1958
The Hothouse
April 24, 1980
1959
Revue sketches—
Trouble in the Works; The Black and White
July 15, 1959
Request Stop; Last to Go; Special Offer
September 23, 1959
That’s Your Trouble; That’s All; Applicant; Interview; Dialogue for Three
1959
A Night Out
March 1, 1960
1959
The Caretaker
April, 27, 1960
1960
Night School
July 21, 1960
1960
The Dwarfs
December 2, 1960
1961
The Collection
May 11, 1961
1962
The Lover
March 28, 1963
1963
The Pumpkin Eater
(screenplay)
1963
The Caretaker
(screenplay)
1963
The Servant
(screenplay)
1963
Tea Party
(short story)
1964
Tea Party
March 25, 1965
1964
The Homecoming
June 3, 1965
1965
The Quiller Memorandum
(screenplay)
1965
The Compartment
(unpublished, unproduced screenplay)
(adapted for stage as The Basement)
1966
Accident
(screenplay)
1966
The Bas
ement
February 28, 1967
1967
Landscape
April 25, 1968
1968
Silence
July 2, 1969
1968
The Birthday Party
(unpublished screenplay)
1969
The Homecoming
(screenplay)
Night
April 9, 1969
1970
The Go-Between
(screenplay)
1970
Langrishe, Go Down
(screenplay)
1970
Old Times
June 1, 1971
1971
Poems
(poems)
1972
Monologue
April 10, 1973
1972
The Proust Screenplay
(unproduced screenplay)
1974
The Last Tycoon
(screenplay)
1974
No Man’s Land
April 23, 1975
1975
The Coast
(short story)
1976
Problem
(short story)
1977
Lola
(short story)
1977
I Know the Place
(poems)
1978
Betrayal
November 15, 1978
1980
Family Voices
January 22, 1981
1981
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
(screenplay)
1982
Victoria Station
A Kind of Alaska
Performed with Family Voices as a trilogy titled Other Places in 1982
1982
Victory
(unproduced screenplay)
1982, 1983
Betrayal
(screenplay)
1983
Precisely (sketch)
December 18, 1983
1984
Turtle Diary
(screenplay)
1984
One for the Road
March 15, 1984
1987
The Handmaid’s Tale
(unpublished screenplay)
1988
The Heat of the Day
(screenplay)
1988
Mountain Language
October 20, 1988
1989
Reunion
(screenplay)
1989
The Comfort of Strangers
(screenplay)
Ten Early Poems
(poems)
1991
The New World Order
July 19, 1991
1991
Party Time
October 31, 1991
1991
Party Time
(screenplay)
1993
Moonlight
September 7, 1993
1993
The Trial
(screenplay)
1995
Short Story
(short story)
1995
Girls
(short story)
1996
Ashes to Ashes
September 12, 1996
1997
The Dreaming Child
(unproduced screenplay)
1997
God’s District (sketch)
1999
Celebration
March 16, 2000
1999
Sorry About This
(short story)
2000
The Tragedy of King Lear
(unpublished screenplay)
2000
Remembrance of Things Past
November 23, 2000
2000
Tess
(short story)
2001
Voices in the Tunnel
(short story)
2002
“The Disappeared” and Other Poems
(poems)
2002
Press Conference (sketch)
2005
Voices
(radio play)
2006
Apart From That (sketch)
2007
Sleuth
(screenplay)
2007
The Mirror
(short story)
2007
Six Poems for A.
(poems)
INTRODUCTION
A speech made by Harold Pinter in Hamburg, West Germany, on being awarded the 1970 German Shakespeare Prize.
When I was informed that I was to be given this award my reaction was to be startled, even bewildered, while at the same time to feel deeply gratified by this honour. I remain honoured and slightly bewildered, but also frightened. What frightens me is that I have been asked to speak to you today. If I find writing difficult I find public address doubly so.
Once, many years ago, I found myself engaged uneasily in a public discussion on the theatre. Someone asked me what my work was ‘about.’ I replied with no thought at all and merely to frustrate this line of enquiry: ‘The weasel under that cocktail cabinet.’ That was a great mistake. Over the years I have seen that remark quoted in a number of learned columns. It has now seemingly acquired a profound significance, and is seen to be a highly relevant and meaningful observation about my own work. But for me the remark meant precisely nothing. Such are the dangers of speaking in public.
In what way can one talk about one’s work? I’m a writer, not a critic. When I use the word work I mean work. I regard myself as nothing more than a working man.
I am moved by the fact that the selection committee for the Shakespeare Prize has judged my work, in the context of this award, as worthy of it, but it’s impossible for me to understand the reasons that led them to their decision. I’m at the other end of the telescope. The language used, the opinions given, the approvals and objections engendered by one’s work happen in a sense outside one’s actual experience of it, since the core of that experience consists in writing the stuff. I have a particular relationship with the words I put down on paper and the characters which emerge from them which no one else can share with me. And perhaps that’s why I remain bewildered by praise and really quite indifferent to insult. Praise and insult refer to someone called Pinter. I don’t know the man they’re talking about. I know the plays, but in a totally different way, in a quite private way.
If I am to talk at all I prefer to talk practically about practical matters, but that’s no more than a pious hope, since one invariably slips into theorising, almost without noticing it. And I distrust theory. In whatever capacity I have worked in the theatre, and apart from writing, I have done quite a bit of acting and a certain amount of directing for the stage, I have found that theory, as such, has never been helpful; either to myself, or, I have noticed, to few of my colleagues. The best sort of collaborative working relationship in the theatre, in my view, consists in a kind of stumbling erratic shorthand, through which facts are lost, collided with, fumbled, found again. One excellent director I know has never been known to complete a sentence. He has such instinctive surety and almost subliminal powers of communication that actors respond to his words before he has said them.
I don’t want to imply that I am counselling lack of intelligence as a working aid. On the contrary, I am referring to an intelligence brought to bear on practical and relevant matters, on matters which are active and alive and specific, an intelligence working with others to find the legitimate and therefore compulsory facts and make them concrete for us on the stage. A rehearsal period which consists of philosophical discourse or political treatise does not get the curtain up at eight o’clock.
I have referred to facts, by which I mean theatrical facts. It is true to say that theatrical facts do not easily disclose their secrets, and it is very easy, when
they prove stubborn, to distort them, to make them into something else, or to pretend they never existed. This happens more often in the theatre than we care to recognize and it is proof either of incompetence or fundamental contempt for the work in hand.
I believe that when a writer looks at the blank of the word he has not yet written, or when actors and directors arrive at a given moment on stage, there is only one proper thing that can take place at that moment, and that that thing, that gesture, that word on the page, must alone be found, and once found, scrupulously protected. I think I am talking about necessary shape, both as regards a play and its production.
If there is, as I believe, a necessary, an obligatory shape which a play demands of its writer, then I have never been able to achieve it myself. I have always finished the last draft of a play with a mixture of feelings: relief, disbelief, exhilaration, and a certainty that if I could only wring the play’s neck once more it might yield once more to me, that I could get it better, that I could get the better of it, perhaps. But that’s impossible. You create the word and in a certain way the word, in finding its own life, stares you out, is obdurate, and more often than not defeats you. You create the characters and they prove to be very tough. They observe you, their writer, warily. It may sound absurd, but I believe I am speaking the truth when I say that I have suffered two kinds of pain through my characters. I have witnessed their pain when I am in the act of distorting them, of falsifying them, and I have witnessed their contempt. I have suffered pain when I have been unable to get to the quick of them, when they willfully elude me, when they withdraw into the shadows. And there’s a third and rarer pain. That is when the right word, or the right act jolts them or stills them into their proper life. When that happens the pain is worth having. When that happens I am ready to take them into the nearest bar and buy drinks all round. And I hope they would forgive me my trespasses against them and do the same for me. But there is no question that quite a conflict takes place between the writer and his characters and on the whole I would say the characters are the winners. And that’s as it should be, I think. Where a writer sets out a blueprint for his characters, and keeps them rigidly to it, where they do not at any time upset his applecart, where he has mastered them, he has also killed them, or rather terminated their birth, and he has a dead play on his hands.