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compiled and Know arranged by the Education Department the of the Shakespeare Show Theatre “Know the Show” support materials compiled and arranged by the Education Department of The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey Know the Show: No Man’s Land — 2 About the Playwright: Harold Pinter Harold Pinter was born in 1930 in Hackney, a working-class “Pinter’s dialogue is as tightly - perhaps more tightly - controlled neighborhood in London’s East End, the son of a tailor. Both of than verse,” Martin Esslin writes. “Every syllable, every inflection, his parents were English-born Jews. As a child Pinter got along the succession of long and short sounds, words and sentences, well with his mother, but clashed with his father, who was a is calculated to nicety. And precisely the repetitiousness, the strong disciplinarian. At the outbreak of World War II, Pinter was discontinuity, the circularity of ordinary vernacular speech are evacuated from the city to Cornwall, where he lived with 26 other here used as formal elements with which the poet can compose his boys in a castle along the coast. This experience of being wrenched linguistic ballet.” from his parents was a traumatic and formative event for the 10- year old Pinter. “The condition of being bombed has never left Several of Pinter’s plays were originally written for British radio or me,” Pinter later said. TV. Beginning in the 1960s, he also directed several of his dramas, and went on to direct plays by other authors as well. Closely Pinter was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School, where associated with the director Sir Peter Hall, he became an associate he acted in school productions, directed by an English teacher director of the National Theatre after Hall was nominated as the who became his mentor, Joseph Brearley. English literature, successor of Sir Lawrence Olivier. In the 1990s Pinter became more particularly poetry, became one of Pinter’s main interests. He active as a director than as a playwright. After Betrayal (1978) avidly read the work of Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway. He Pinter wrote no new full-length plays until Moonlight (1994). also ran track and played cricket— a sport which became a lifelong passion for him. Following the overthrow of Chile’s President Allende in 1973, Pinter became active in human rights issues. His opinions were often In 1948, Pinter enrolled in London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic controversial. During the Kosovo crisis in 1999, Pinter condemned Arts, but left after two unhappy years in which he skipped most of NATO’s intervention, saying it would “only aggravate the misery his classes. Around the same time, Pinter was fined by magistrates and the horror and devastate the country”. In his speech to an anti- for having, as a conscientious objector, refused to do his national war meeting at the House of Commons in November 2002, Pinter military service. Pinter had two trials. “I could have gone to prison joined the world-wide debate over the so-called “preventive war” - I took my toothbrush to the trials - but it so happened that the against Iraq: “Bush has said: ‘We will not allow the world’s worst magistrate was slightly sympathetic, so I was fined instead, thirty weapons to remain in the hands of the world’s worst leaders.’ Quite pounds in all. Perhaps I’ll be called up again in the next war, but right. Look in the mirror, chum. That’s you.” In February 2005 I won’t go.” Pinter’s father paid the fine in the end, a substantial Pinter announced in an interview that he had decided to abandon sum of money at the time. his career as a playwright and put all his energy into politics. “I’ve written 29 plays. Isn’t that enough?” In 1950 Pinter started to publish poems in Poetry (London) under the name Harold Pinta. He worked as a bit-part actor on a BBC Pinter received many awards, including the Berlin Film Festival Radio program, Focus on Football Pools. He also studied for a Silver Bear in 1963, BAFTA awards, including in 1996 the Laurence short time at the Central School of Speech and Drama and toured Olivier Award for lifetime achievement in the theatre. In 2002 he Ireland from 1951 to 1952 with a Shakespearean troupe. In 1953 he was made a Companion of Honour for services to literature. In appeared during Donald Wolfit’s 1953 season at the King’s Theatre 2005, Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. in Hammersmith. He was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus in 2002, and After four more years in provincial repertory theatre under the continued to work and write despite his declining health for several pseudonym David Baron, Pinter began to write for the stage. The years. Harold Pinter died on December 24, 2008, in London. Room (1957), originally written for Bristol University’s drama department, was finished in four days. A Slight Ache, Pinter’s In His Own Words: first radio piece, was broadcast on the BBC in 1959. His first full- length play, The Birthday Party, was first performed by Bristol “I can sum up none of my plays. I can describe none of them, University’s drama department in 1957 and produced in 1958 in the except to say: That is what happened. That is what they said. That West End. The play, which closed with disastrous reviews after one is what they did.” week, dealt in a Kafkaesque manner with an apparently ordinary man who is threatened by strangers for an unknown reason. He “Once, many years ago, I found myself engaged uneasily in a public tries to run away but is tracked down. Although most reviewers discussion on the theatre. Someone asked me what my work was were hostile, Pinter produced in rapid succession the body of work ‘about.’ I replied with no thought at all and merely to frustrate this which made him the master of ‘the comedy of menace.’ “I find line of enquiry: ‘The weasel under the cocktail cabinet.’ That was critics on the whole a pretty unnecessary bunch of people”, Pinter a great mistake. Over the years I have seen that remark quoted said decades later in an interview. “We don’t need critics to tell the in a number of learned columns. It has now seemingly acquired audiences what to think.” a profound significance, and is seen to be a highly relevant and meaningful observation about my own work. But for me the Pinter’s major plays often originate from a single, powerful visual remark meant precisely nothing. Such are the dangers of speaking image. They are usually set in a single room, whose occupants are in public.” threatened by forces or people whose precise intentions neither the characters nor the audience can define. The struggle for survival or identity dominates the action. Language is not only used as a means of communication but as a weapon. Beneath the words, silences may indicate rage, domination, or fear of intimacy. The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey Know the Show: No Man’s Land — 3 Commentary and Criticism If you know your Pinter, the underlying message is clear: Harold Pinter’s new play, No Man’s Land, is about precisely someone is foolishly getting into a situation that he won’t be what its title suggests: the sense of being caught in some able to understand, handle or escape... There they are, stuck mysterious limbo between life and death, between a world with their memories, hopes, insecurities and illusions. It’s of brute reality and one of fluid uncertainty. But although like watching four failed explorers marooned in Antarctica. plenty of plays, from Sweeny Agonistes to Outward Bound, have tried to pin down that strange sense of reaching into Benedict Nightingale a void, I can think of few that have done so as concretely, The Times of London, 10/10/08 funnily and concisely as Pinter’s. In broad outline, No Man’s Land could be made to sound like In one way, the play is a masterly summation of all the a re-tread of the earlier classic, The Caretaker. Once again, themes that have long obsessed Pinter: the fallibility of a stranger, invited into a living space, opportunistically memory, the co-existence in one man of brute strength and tries to settle himself there on a permanent basis by sowing sensitivity, the ultimate unknowability of women, the notion dissension among the occupants, only to be stymied by that all human contact is a battle between who and whom. the powers of the status quo ante. Instead of a tramp, the interloper is Spooner, the failed, down-at-heel poet whom It is in no sense a dry, mannerist work but a living, theatrical Hirst, the grand man of letters, has picked up in a Hampstead experience full of rich comedy in which one speech pub. But, as this production suggests with a comic eeriness constantly undercuts another: a devastating four-letter and pervasive poetry, the later play is much more subjective word indictment of Spooner, for instance, is followed by and dream-like, almost as if the participants – Spooner, Hirst’s “yes, yes, but he’s a good man at heart: I knew him at Hirst, and the latter’s jumped-up thuggish minders, Foster Oxford,” and the minutely-timed laugh would not disgrace and Briggs – were warring aspects of a single psychic Jack Benny. Pinter’s achievement, in fact, is to have treated economy. comically a theme that most writers tackle with sententious gravity: that at any moment in time the real, tangible world Paul Taylor may turn out to be an illusion.