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Pinter’s Nobel Truth

As we prepared this issue focused on , the novelist, playwright, and winner of the 2004 for Literature, news came that Harold Pinter had won the 2005 award. The announcement added Pinter’s name to a list of authors rais- ing the strongest possible voices of political dissent in their respective countries. Like Jelinek, Dario Fo, , , and other playwright-novelists who have received the prize in recent years, Pinter has expressed for decades an underlying commitment to social justice, freedom of expression, human rights, and resistance to authoritarian regimes. Although the academy’s official citation made minimal mention of Pinter’s polem- ics, observers wondered whether Stockholm intended to endorse his timely denuncia- tions of American and British foreign policy. Pinter shaped his dramaturgy of psy- chological menace and staccato utterances in the 1950s and 1960s and has not deviated much from it since. But over the past two decades, the author has forged a second métier as a human rights campaigner and political firebrand. In Britain he regularly appears at demonstrations and contributes to newspaper opinion pages. In 1985, Pinter and investigated the Turkish military dictatorship’s alleged persecution of writers on behalf of International P.E.N. The author has advocated for the rights of Kurds in Turkey (calling that government’s policies “genocide” and dramatizing the persecution in his play Mountain Language). He has denounced oppressive regimes throughout Latin America and the U.S. government’s support for them (especially in El Salvador and ). For incurring civilian casualties in aerial bombing campaigns since the 1990s — especially in Afghanistan and Iraq — Pinter has called Bush and Blair war criminals and murderers, and has demanded their arraignment in the Interna- tional Court of Justice.



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On Iraq, Pinter has been unequivocal. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he called on Bush and Blair to account for the “vast tapestry of lies” surrounding the war. He again invoked the International Criminal Court of Justice but acknowledged that Bush has refused to accept its jurisdiction. Maintaining power, he said, was the sole concern of a militaristic superpower. In the second half of the twentieth century, he added, the U.S. government has “supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing mili- tary dictatorship in the world. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile.” He was careful, however, to distinguish his political objections from the general anti-Americanism sweeping through Europe since 9/11. “Thousands, if not millions,” of American people, he added, are “sickened, shamed, and angered” by their govern- ment’s policies. “As things stand they are not a coherent force — yet.” Despite the occasional nuances in his rhetoric, the British press tends to dismiss his views as rantings. Pinter, in turn, sees this reception as evidence of a philistine country that (like the United States) values writers more as entertainers than as intel- lectuals: “All that I can say is that if they have contempt for me it is as nothing to the contempt I have for them.” It will be interesting to see what Pinter’s enshrinement in now provokes. U.S. audiences, who think of his plays only as cryptic existen- tial mysteries, may finally be forced to confront his political indictment. — Tom Sellar

Ekkehard Schall (1930 – 2005)

Ekkehard Schall, a leading actor of the Berliner Ensemble from its early triumphs through its highly contentious history to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, died on September 3 in Buckow, the Brecht family’s retreat near Berlin, where he lived with his wife Barbara, the daughter of Helene Weigel and . By his own account he first auditioned for Brecht in 1949, during the rehearsals of Mother Courage. Though “downright repulsed by Schiller,” the master asked him to do a scene from Schiller’s Don Carlos. Then Brecht put the young brazen actor through



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his famous exercise: singing — in many variations — the popular, gruesomely inane children’s round song “A dog came to the kitchen / and stole a crust of bread . . . ” (later used by Beckett in Waiting for Godot). Brecht didn’t hire Schall, who instead joined the Neue Bühne (New Stage, known today as the Maxim Gorki Theater). Three years later, in 1952, Schall was accepted into the Berliner Ensemble, where he rose to fame as the exemplary Brechtian actor in definitive performances as Coriolanus, Galileo, Azdak, and Arturo Ui, among countless other roles. A consummate, virtuoso per- former, his comedic exuberance had to be kept in check at times. Nevertheless, under the watchful eyes of his mother-in-law, colleague, and boss Helene Weigel and the rigorous directorial discipline of Brecht disciple Manfred Wekwerth, he came to wow the world as the model incarnate of Verfremdung. Schall’s career coincided with the Cold War. He remained loyal to the Marxist principles maintained by Brecht and to the GDR political system, which he problem- atically represented to the world. Critical responses to his performances in the West, particularly in West Germany, frequently reflected the tensions of the Cold War. After the collapse of the GDR, the Berliner Ensemble, struggling to free itself from Brechtian dogma, finally parted with the majority of the old ensemble — including Schall — under the robust leadership of Claus Peymann, the former director of the Vienna Burgtheater. Schall continued to act, most notably at the small Berlin “Theater 89,” where I saw him in two stellar performances: In 2001 in A Child of His Time, a solo performance adapted from Ödön von Horváth’s chilling story of a young unemployed man’s road to death in Hitler’s army, and in 2003 as in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. The utterly unadorned grace of his portrayals illuminated with breathtaking clarity the lightness at the heart of Brecht’s theatrical vision, beyond dogma, beyond virtuosity. Schall planned to play Lear, to be directed by Schall’s daughter Johanna, the artistic director of the Rostock , with costumes designed by his younger daugh- ter Jenny. — Gitta Honegger

Special thanks to Denise Luccioni, and to Emmanuelle de Montgazon and the Cul- tural Service of the Embassy of France in the United States for their generous assistance with this issue’s section on Théâtre du Soleil.



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