Carole Angier

His English Elements

Pinter in the Theatre

By

Nick Hern Books 234pp £14.99 order from our bookshop

In 1957, when he was twenty-seven, Harold Pinter sat among the audience for his very first play. It was ‘a remarkable experience’, he tells an interviewer here. How? ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I wanted to piss very badly throughout the whole thing, and at the end I dashed out behind the bicycle shed.’

That is vintage Pinter – comic, sardonic, shockingly real. And something more, which this book brings out better than anything else I have ever read about Pinter: deeply English. I don’t just mean lavatorial, but hanging out a No Entry sign as soon as anyone comes too close; using words not to communicate but to cover up, like his characters. Is there anything more English than that? 

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