“Both of these plays mean a good deal to me,” Pinter said as we were being driven in a car to the Gramercy at the peak of a fierce snowstorm. Blowing sleet obscured the car’s windshield. The driver looked grim. Pinter didn’t seem to notice. He looked out the window briefly, mentioning that he and his wife, the writer Antonia Fraser, hoped to be able to leave their hotel at four-thirty the next morning to make a plane to Barbados.
As our car crunched slowly over the icy street, Pinter said calmly enough, but firmly, “ ‘Ashes to Ashes’ is about torturers and victims. The woman in this two-character play is haunted. And so am I. I’m haunted. I’m haunted by barbaric acts around me. ‘The Hothouse’ is about the idiocy and savagery of people in power. Wherever I go, I’m haunted by it.”
Pinter had just been to Princeton, where he gave a lecture before an overflow crowd of several hundred. “I don’t lecture,” he said. “So I read from six of my plays, playing all the parts. Then I answered questions. I wasn’t going to say anything political gratuitously. But, as soon as someone asked what I thought of the Labour Government in England, I went for it. I said I was against bombing Iraq. I said I was against killing innocent people. I said that when Clinton became President he bombed Baghdad. It was a machismo thing. He managed to kill a woman a friend of mine knew, a woman who ran a beautiful art gallery—and her children, too. He killed people. These people are dead. They may have been forgotten by some, but I never forget anything.”
Pinter looked very much the same as he had in 1967, when he was here with his twelfth play, “The Homecoming.” In these pages I described him then, at thirty-six, as handsome, amiable-looking, with black hair and sideburns. He is still handsome, still amiable-looking, but a bit heavier now, and his black hair and sideburns are tinged with gray. He had on a large, loose-fitting black overcoat over a black suit and a black shirt. His voice sounds deeper now, almost Churchillian.
“I’ve changed,” he said, with a friendly smile. “I always felt strongly about political abuses of power, about governments killing people. I was a conscientious objector when I was eighteen. I never stopped feeling strongly about war, about bombings. I used to be more thin-skinned, but I was always resolute. Now, though, I’ve put all my cards on the table.”
He gave an unmistakably resolute smile. “I protest, I write letters, I speak, I’m on the picket line in front of 10 Downing Street,” he said. “I don’t like what Mrs. Thatcher’s and Mr. Major’s Government did and what Prime Minister Blair’s Government is doing, what President Bush’s government did and what President Clinton is doing—the bombings, the sanctions, starving people. I don’t like the way the Lords have tried to stop Pinochet’s extradition to Spain by claiming that one of the Lords who voted to have him extradited was linked to Amnesty International. Totally preposterous. Everyone should belong to Amnesty International! Pinochet was in power with the support of the United States. When I picket, I carry a placard reading ‘Pinochet Is a Mass Murderer.’ Antonia goes with me. Tomorrow, instead of in Barbados, I’d like to be in front of 10 Downing Street, picketing. I’m not popular with any government. Mr. Major wanted to make me a knight. I thanked the Government, but I declined. I said I would not accept such recognition from a conservative Government.
“Some critics seem to think that an artist should not raise his head above the parapets,” Pinter said. “I feel lucky to have the freedom to say what I feel, to say what I think. That’s not a distraction from my work. That’s an obligation. It is my work. The plays are the plays. The plays are separate. I’m me.”
Pinter said that he still writes his plays, as he always has, in longhand in pen on yellow legal-pad paper, and that he is bringing home a big supply of those yellow pads, because he couldn’t get them in England. He wrote “The Hothouse” in 1958. “At the time, I’d just had the première of ‘The Birthday Party,’ my first play. No one came. It was massacred by the critics. It came off in one week. So I didn’t think anyone that year would produce ‘The Hothouse.’ In 1979, I made a few changes in the play, directed it, acted in it, and in 1982 brought it over here, where it had only a brief run. So this is a welcome revival.”
“The Hothouse” is being directed here by Karen Kohlhaas; Karel Reisz is directing “Ashes to Ashes.” “The woman in ‘Ashes to Ashes’ is identifying with the world of violence, with the victims of abuse and violence, the dead victims,” Pinter said. “They’re encapsulated in this woman’s sensibilities. The play is saying we’re all encouraged to pretend that the killings are not happening. It’s that old familiar line from the John Donne poem—‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ ‘The Hothouse,’ ‘The Birthday Party,’ ‘The Dumb Waiter’ all deal with these things. But I still get a few laughs out of them. ‘The Hothouse’ is funny. It’s about an authoritarian system. The image is a convalescent home, but actually it’s a prison, a world of violence and killing.
“My parents were pleased with their boy,” Pinter said, smiling. “I always remained close to my parents. They loved Antonia, and she loved them. I have a forty-one-year-old son from my first marriage, to Vivien Merchant, and I have six stepchildren with Antonia—three writers, two bankers, one barrister—and twelve grandchildren, between the ages of one and eleven. Antonia is ‘Grandma,’ I’m ‘Grandpa.’ ” He grinned in a carefree and happy mode, clearly illustrative of the fact that the plays are the plays and that he is he. “My father died only last year, at ninety-six. I don’t think I’ll make ninety-six. I don’t think I want to,” he said. “Antonia and I just celebrated our twenty-fourth. We lived together for five years before we married. Every year we always celebrate.” ♦
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