In Which We Keep The Fire High And The Wolves Away

"We're Losing You, Darling"

by WILLIAM GOLDMAN

The Broadway season really got exciting with the October 3rd opening of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party. Pinter, born in London in 1930, has been called "the best and most important young playwright now alive." The Birthday Party, his first full-length play, was done in London in 1958, where it died within the week, leaving Pinter just another out of work actor for awhile.

As everyone knows, Bench changed all that. Bench, written for BBC television, proved his first overwhelming success. Many people feel that Kenneth Tynan's lengthy essay on Bench in The Observer did as much for Pinter as Tynan's review of Look Back In Anger had done four years previously for John Osborne.

Bench, of course, is a 50-minute play, all of it taking place, as the title suggests, on a lonely seaside bench in an (unnamed) English resort town. The play, a series of seemingly disconnected encounters between men occupying the bench, comes to a climax in the famous scene reprinted below.

on the set of "The Go-Between"

(The two characters in the scene have, if anyone has forgotten, appeared in the play once before, but not together; this is the only time in the play that anyone returns to the bench for a second visit.) It might be advisable here to give the scene a glance again, along with some of what Mr. Tynan wrote about it, to see what light it sheds on Pinter in general, and The Birthday Party in particular.

DUSK. TEDDY ON THE BENCH ALONE. A TREMENDOUS MAN. STAN APPROACHES, HESITATES. TINY. ABRUPTLY HE SITS ON THE BENCH, KNEE TO KNEE WITH THE GIANT TEDDY.

TEDDY

Hello.

STAN

What'd you say - what'd you say?

TEDDY

(pause)

Nothing.

STAN

Oh.

(pause)

The roses...

TEDDY

What'd you say — what'd you say?

STAN

I said the roses.

TEDDY

The roses what? Get on with it - the roses what?

STAN

(pause, then rises, stands over the bigger man)

You know what.

TEDDY

I do, do I?

STAN

(pause)

You know and Frankie knows.

(long pause)

Frankie knows better than you know.

(pause)

But you know.

TEDDY

All I did was say hello.

STAN

You denied the roses!

TEDDY

Keep your damn roses.

STAN

(longest pause)

I intend to, mate. Tell that to Frankie. Tell him the roses are ... are ...

TEDDY

Are what?

STAN

(pause)

Bloody well mine...

STAN GOES. DUSK. TEDDY ON THE BENCH ALONE. TREMENDOUS.

FINAL FADE OUT

The following is excerpted from Tynan's Observer article of November 27, 1960. "...as good as the play is, and certainly for a television play it has been extraordinary, it is not until the terminal confrontation between Teddy and Stan that one realizes that one is not only in the presence of an artist, but incredibly (the man has just turned thirty) an artist already at the peaks of his powers.

"I know of no other modern dramaturgy as compressed as this: 16 speeches, 85 words, and (most significantly) 8 pauses. At first, when the two men are seated 'knee to knee,' it seems we are to witness the most wearisome of modern theatrical clichés, the 'deviate pickup scene.' But very soon it is clear that what we are watching is, for Pinter, the ultimate violence: the announcement of a future murder. (A lesser artist would never be content with the indication of violence; he would have to show the crime.) Pinter hints at it, conveys it, then leaves it, and at the same time leaves us sick with frustration. For surely Stan is going to die. And surely we cannot save him.

"What is Stan's crime? Clearly he is not the least ashamed of it; no man ashamed would hurl a charge the way Stan hurls 'You denied the roses!' at Teddy. And that of course is Stan's crime: he is not ashamed. For he is Man and not ashamed of it, and for that he must die; for that, Teddy, tremendous Teddy, must kill him. Stan is Man. (Is the rhyme a hint? Probably. Pinter need not have done that.) Man: virile, proud of his red blood. Teddy is, of course, homosexual, which is why Stan sits knee to knee to him - a taunt. Stan is man unafraid, no matter how great the odds or how tremendous the enemy.

"Frankie, referred to twice — some think mysteriously — is not mysterious at all. He is, of course, St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan order, all this clearly indicated by the fact that the Franciscans have split into three orders, just as the human race is split into thirds: men, women and homosexuals such as Teddy.

"What Bench is then, finally, is a heterosexual outcry against the modern world. Telling, moving, painful in its honesty, brilliant in its conception, it is pure Pinter. One finale note: some critics have wondered why, since Bench is concerned with the world being in thirds — men, women and deviates — there are no women characters. The obvious Freudian reply would be that Woman is indeed present: the Great Woman herself; the Sea.

"But Pinter is far past Freud, and the final answer is his alone, for his art is not really menace or fear. It is the God-given ability to infuse universal meaning through the use of secrets. And if you tell what your secrets mean, well, they would hardly be secrets any more, now would they?"

With Tynan's analysis in mind, let us proceed to The Birthday Party. American critics had a terrible time with it. John Chapman of the New York Daily News called it a "whatzit." Clive Barnes of the Times thought it was incomporably one of the two most interesting plays to appear on Broadway in some seasons, the other being Pinter's Tony-award winner from the previous year, The Homecoming. Richard Watts of the Post was in between, finding it both cryptic and dramatically artful.

The television critics were similarly in disarray; one of them felt that it started slowly but really picked up speed as it went along, while another thought it had a terrific beginning but bogged down toward the end. Pinter, of course, is famous for leaving certain things unsaid, and this annoyed The New Yorker critic, who felt it would have been all right had Pinter been forced "to be mysterious because of political pressure or the like," while Time felt his "unwillingness to communicate is his central theme" and therefore crucial to his work. The Newsweek man felt....there's really no telling what the Newsweek man felt, because he kept putting these strange words down one after the other. The following strange words occur after a plot synopsis: "Into this orchestration of rock-bottom behavior and starkly pungent language, Pinter builds a polyphony of hints, insinuations, metaphysical tips and touts that add up, not to 'meaning', but to a visitation of portentous activity."

Never mind what The Birthday Party's about, what's Newsweek about?

Alan Schneider, who directed the production, has a notion what The Birthday Party is about: "Somebody is after somebody else and gets 'em." Schneider, a Tony-award winner for his work on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is probably the busiest drama director on Broadway. Schneider is fifty, looks a lot less, and is enormously articulate, which is interesting only insofar as most of his best known work has been with playwrights who tend to defy articulation — Albee, Samuel Beckett and Pinter. "I've done a lot of plays that seem to have no meaning — The Trial is my favorite novel — I have a drive toward the thing that isn't defined. I'm Russian, maybe that's why."

Schneider had been with The Birthday Party a long time. "Since 1958. I arrived in England the week it closed and happened to see the Sunday reviews. I thought it sounded interesting, but I couldn't find the play. I was casting understudies, and somebody said, 'Please take a look at this actor friend of mine; he desperately needs the work.' And this guy and his wife came in, and it was Pinter, using his actor's name, I think. Later, when we got know each other, he said, 'I've got this play I wish you'd look at,' and it was The Birthday Party.

"It's gone through three stages since then. I wanted to do it and I brought it home with me, but it was impossible for anyone to read it at that time — Beckett and the rest of them hadn't happened yet. Yale said no to it; the Actors' Studio said no to it; I just put it aside. Then Harold became respectable with The Caretaker, and there were lots of offers to do it off-Broadway, using The Caretaker as an example of why it shouldn't be done on Broadway, since The Caretaker failed financially. But Harold said 'No.' Finally, with The Homecoming. Harold is now commercial. So, after — what is it? — almost ten years, it's being done."

To understand just what was so difficult about The Birthday Party, a summary of the plot might be in order. A piano player is living as the lone boarder with an elderly couple in a house at the English seaside. Two men, a Jew and an Irishman, come to take rooms, and the piano player is upset. The landlady tells the two men that it is the piano player's birthday, and a party is arranged, a neighboring girl being among those invited. Before the party, the two men savagely interrogate the piano player, accuse him of leaving the "organization." At this point violence would probably erupt if the landlady didn't appear dressed for the party. The party begins, and during a game of blindman's bluff, the lights go out. In the darkness there is confusion, and as the Jew and the Irishman advance with flashlights toward the piano players, he retreats, giggling wildly. In the third act, the piano player, now nearly catatonic, is taken away by the strangers to face someone named Monty.

To repeat director Schneider's words: "Somebody is after somebody else and gets 'em." Nothing is particularly difficult about the skeletal plot. It's really a 1930s gangster movie: John Garfield is hiding out, having left the Mafia, and Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet come and drag him back to face Edward G. Robinson.

Except there are a lot of things that Pinter doesn't ever say. For example, it isn't the Mafia — oh, it might be, or it might be the American Dental Association. He never specifies. The reference is only to the "organization." And the big boss, Monty: that's all we ever know about him, his name. We don't really know that he's the big boss; we only know that the piano player is being taken to see Monty. We don't even know if the piano player is a piano player; he tells us about a concert he played, but the circumstances are so strange, and so is he, that it all might be a figment. And, of course, it isn't his birthday. His landlady says it is, but he tells us it isn't.

The New York Times has called Pinterism "maximum tension through minimum information," and it was just this frustrating lack of facts that infuriated the Wednesday matinee ladies at The Birthday Party. Now these were good women, doing their damnedest to keep up. Before the first act curtain, two of them were talking about the problems with their teenage sons.

FIRST WOMAN

I put on the Lovin' Spoonful; Simon and Garfunkel I tried.

SECOND WOMAN

Good for you.

FIRST WOMAN

"Explain it to me," I said to him. "I would like to know."

SECOND WOMAN

What did he say?

FIRST WOMAN

Nothing. Nothing. I practically begged. "Help me," I said. "I don't understand. Does my needle need changing?"

Clearly, they were trying, these two. At the first act intermission, they walked silently up the aisles. Finally, one of them spoke.

FIRST WOMAN

It's about the terrors of everyday life.

SECOND WOMAN

I don't get that too much.

The second act of the play contains the birthday party itself, which ends in semidarkness. One of the final moments before the curtain has the piano player on top of the neighbor girl, who is spread-eagled and motionless. The whole theatre was buzzing as the ladies moved to smoke. "It's always like this," an usher said. "This jabbering. Always." In the lobby, half a dozen women were inhaling angrily.

FIRST WOMAN

Why? That's all I wanna know - just why?

SECOND WOMAN

Why what?

FIRST WOMAN

Why does he do this? If I were an artist, I would want to communicate. That's my job. I'm an artist. I'm supposed to communicate. Something. It shouldn't just have form — form's not enough — gotta be content — anything to communicate. What's with this Pinter? Why?

I talked to Pinter about it. He said, "It's a bloody big bore when they can't accept a thing for what happens on stage. On the whole, the what's-it-all-about business is more pronounced over here. It's about what the people do on the stage. Otherwise you could just put a poster up on stage, couldn't you? 'This scene is about...the next scene is about...' I'm not a sociologist; I'm just a writer. And I don't conceptualize very much. Never before and never after.

"The original idea was the domestic situation: someone upstairs sleeping in a house, a boarder. The lodger eventually comes down. The domestic situation by the seaside, that was the start of it. The other characters didn't arrive till later. One day, about 20 pages in, Goldberg and McCann turned up. I didn't know anything about them until they appeared.

"This what's-it-about business - one regrets it. I'm doing a play now; it's my first in three years, and it means a great deal to me. I've done less and less writing for the stage. Writing becomes more difficult the older you get, at least it does for me. I found some 1950 poems of mine recently; I was astonished by the freedom I had, the energy, a complete uncaringness about form. I can't write that way anymore. I'm thirty-seven now. I feel as if I'm eighty."

He sounded very tired as he spoke. He was in America for a few days, and there were at least 50 requests for interviews. Every radio station wanted him, most of the TV, many of the newspapers, the magazines. Everybody wondering what it was all about.

FIRST WOMAN

It's got a lot to do with menace, that much I can tell you.

SECOND WOMAN

Oh, yes, very much. Menace and terror, yes.

They moved down the aisles, and the third act started. Halfway through, a "buzz-buzz-buzz" of wonder burst across the theatre: Lulu, the neighbor girl who had been motionless and spread-eagled at the second act curtain, made her entrance, and the ladies had to get it straight.

SECOND WOMAN

What is this? I thought she was dead.

FIRST WOMAN

She was dead.

SECOND WOMAN

Don't tell me dead, she's standing there.

FIRST WOMAN

She's a symbol.

The street was stuffed with children. December: 60 degrees, 11:15 in the morning, and it's raining. They stand there, waiting. Above them, teachers hold umbrellas as they hem the children in toward the building line, doing their best to keep the sidewalk at least partially clear.

11:20, and the children are quiet, but now they are beginning to hop up and down in place, hop, hop, staring toward the front of the line which begins at the entrance to Loew's Eighty-sixth Street movie theatre on Third Avenue.

Inside the theatre lobby the ushers are getting ready for the onslaught. There are 3,000 kids already seated in the theatre, jamming it, but the special Christmas play is ending, and they have to be cleared before the 3,000 kids outside can come in for the second show.

11:25, and it's as if some giant vacuum cleaner is sucking the first-show audience toward the exit doors. Ffffft, and they're going, going, and in the lobby the ushers are looking at each other, getting ready, making last-minute checks with the teachers standing outside in the rain.

11:30, and in they come! Not slowly, no trickle, just whoosh! and then the flood —

— this way —

— no no no this way —

— follow Irving everybody —

Out of the rain they come, silent, and maybe four feet tall on average, all colors, shapes, you name it, and gloriously wet and —

— up the stairs —

— hit it kids —

— now don't move — (This from a tough Italian teacher to part of his group, who froze on the word move, while he went off after some others. An usher came up to them and said, "Go in, children," but they weren't budging, so the usher said, "Please, children, you're blocking things." But they had been given the word, and the word was don't move. So finally, one of them raised an arm and pointed to the Italian, and the usher ran over to him and explained, and the Italian nodded, that's all, just as quick nod, but his boys knew an order when it was given and now, alive again, they filed down into the theatre and sat.)

— quiet now —

— patience, Sandra —

— hold hands and here we go and —

— the balcony? — (This last from a Negro teacher with Negro children in reply to an usher who was pointing up, and suddenly you could see it on the Negro teacher's face as she looked around to see if any white children were being sent upstairs, too. "Really," the usher told her, "you'll see better, and the main floor's full." And now the Negro teacher saw it was the truth, that the main floor was pretty full and that all colors were heading up the stairs, so still just least suspiciously she gestured for her flock to follow, and up she trudged, dragging her tails behind her.)

— quickly now —

— shhhhh —

And most of them were in before the first great thing happened (this is all going to make sense in time). As these lines of children charged across the lobby of Loew's Eighty-sixth to get in for the free Christmas show, in this wild confusion, one little kid accidentally splintered off from her group and didn't know it because everybody was running one way or another, and instead of running with one group she was running with another. Her teacher caught sight of her as she was about to disappear, and although the teacher had enough to do shepherding the rest of her babes, she set off across the lobby like Gale Sayers, and at the far entrance managed to grab hold of the girl.

As she spun the kid around, what do you think she said? "I told you to watch where you're going!" No. "Can't you ever listen, what's the matter with you?" Never. Not even close. What she said to the small startled eyes was this, "We're losing you, darling."

...we're losing you, darling... (Remember, this will all make sense in time.)

Inside, the 3,000 were seated, and a Negro group sang, "I Believe," and after the clapping, out went the lights. Then a spot hit him jogging down the aisle, red suit and beard and ho-ho-ho, and when he got to the mike, he said, "Merry Christmas, ho-ho-ho, and stay in your seats 'cause I've got my helpers checking on you, and no eating lunches during the show." Then Santa said, "Now let's all sing 'Jingle Bells' together," and he took a breath and started to sing.

But he was already behind them!

That was the second great thing. Because the minute he suggested "Jingle Bells," they were off, all 3,000; they didn't wait for his word "together," and they didn't need any deep breath. The man said sing, "Jingle Bells," so they sang. Then he said he'd back after the show, and the curtain began to open, and as it did, there was that sound again, the "buzz-buzz-buzz" of wonder.

on the set of the caretakerAnd I couldn't help thinking of the ladies at Pinter and how angry they were because they didn't understand what it was all about; so they resisted. And they wouldn't have sung "Jingle Bells" either. They probably would have had to know who the bells belonged to, and what did the one-horse open sleigh really represent, symbolically speaking.

Now this is very dangerous. Let's take the worst possibility: let's say that you think the Pinter play is all about apples, and it turns out it's about oranges. If you liked the apples, what possible difference does it make? You want to know about Harold Pinter? He is an English stylist, talented as hell, and right now he is cresting for one, and only one, reason: he is appropriately obscure; he allows intellectuals to theorize.

And The Birthday Party, if you really want to know what it's about, is about this: there is no hiding place. Does that make it a better play? Does that make the two hours any more pleasant while you're sitting there? Pinter is also saying, "There is no God." Or maybe he isn't. But in either case, it's pretty cornball, right? Examine any art work done down to bone and you find cliché. That's one of the things that's so painful about graduate school. You take some pretty poem, some poem that really moves you, and you examine it and pore over its imagery and decipher the philosophy, and what do you come up with? Keats is saying, "Love thy neighbor."

So what? That's for us intellectuals. We can argue about it. What you have to worry about is just this: You like the poem? Say so. You don't? Say it's spinach, and say to hell with it. Looking at it logically, what conceivable message could Harold Pinter possibly have that the rest of us don't know or couldn't figure out?

pinter with joseph losey

We intellectuals will lead you down the garden path every goddamned time. Want to know whom we named in the eighteenth century as the three greatest writers of all time? Catch this: Homer, Sophocles and Richardson. Richardson. You know, that great, great writer none of us could live without, Richardson. Richardson we were selling then; today we're pushing Pinter. But no one really knows what's worthy. Oh, we pretend; we make believe there are certain definable academic standards that must be met in order for an artist to be considered valuable, but that's our bag. Telling the masses who is good and who isn't is just our way of keeping the fire high and the wolves away.

But because we pretend to know, everybody gets upset if they don't completely understand something. There is nothing, nothing, you should like because some intellectual tells you to. Did you like the scene from Bench any more because Kenneth Tynan said you should? Did that make it better for you? Would it bother you to know that I wrote them both, the play and the essay? Well, I did, so think about that for a second.

Did you actually believe the part where "Tynan" said the scene was about how Teddy was going to kill Stan and we were helpless to stop it? And what about that St. Francis of Assisi business? Did you believe that? Look at it again now:  "Frankie, referred to twice - some think mysteriously - is not mysterious at all. He is, of course, St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan order, all this clearly indicated by the fact that the Franciscans have split into three orders, just as the human race is split into thirds: men, women and homosexuals such as Teddy."

This is the kind of bilge you have to look out for. This is how the intellectuals of this world, the bad ones, make their living. And Pinter is their boy now because, being so obscure, he gives them one and all the opportunity to write reams for their little learned journals, and there's enough for everybody. Pinter's like a minor-league James Joyce, and as long as there's a PhD candidate alive, James Joyce will never die.

But even if Pinter had written Bench and Tynan had done the essay, and more than that, even if Tynan were right about Francis, that still wouldn't make it good. Pinter may be a major dramatist some day, but forget about some day, think about now, and what goes on up there on stage and whether it moves you.

The intellectual wants you to take the trip from the Christmas show to the Pinter play; he needs you to take it, because he has you then. The artist wants to keep you at Christmas, ready to sing "Jingle Bells." It's a bone-dry journey that the intellectual wants you to set out on, and don't you do it. But you are, and that's what so crippling to Broadway. You're taking that trip, and it's sad. Because, in the words of that sweet teacher, "We're losing you, darling."

Or are you already lost?

William Goldman is a legendary screenwriter and novelist born in 1931. "We're Losing You, Darling" is from his yearlong chronicle of Broadway, The Season, which you can buy here. You can read an interview with Harold Pinter here.

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In Which Fate Is The Fool's Word For Chance

Mountebanks and Misfits

From his difficult childhood under the tyrannical rule of an abusive stepfather to his young ascendancy to the heights of American theater, David Mamet is one of America's greatest talents. As he aged he began to produce essays about his dark past, novels about his relationship to his Judaism, and even poetry whose subject is too bizarre to describe. Mamet's ideas about how people talk to one another are evident in every corner of American television and cinema, where his rapid-paced style perfectly fit the limitations of a generation with a short attention span. In 1997 he sat down with the film critic Barbara Shulgasser in front of a San Francisco audience to discuss his ideas about Hollywood, acting, and why he writes. What follows is the first part of that interview.  - A.C.

with second wife rebecca pidgeon 

BARBARA SHULGASSER: You've said that, if you hadn't found the theater, you probably would have become a criminal.

DAVID MAMET: Yeah, I think that that's probably true. I knew a lot of criminals. I used to live with criminals.

BS: How do you mean? Literally in a house with criminals?

DM: No, no I used to spend all day playing poker with them. And then I sold nonexistent real estate for awhile with people who were basically criminals.

BS: Preparation for Glengarry?

DM: Yeah, well, that's what it turned into. And I was one of those kids who was always told that he probably possessed a great intelligence, but why must he act so stupidly? And so I never did very well at anything. So, I figured I was going to end up in prison somewhere.

BS: Uh-huh. What was your response when people asked you why you must act so stupidly?

DM: Well, it took me thirty years to find out that every rhetorical question is an attack.

BS: Yes. I won't ask any.

DM: Oh, good.

BS: Have you had to fight a lot of idiocy in your work in Hollywood?

DM: Only my own.

BS: Your own?

DM: Sure.

BS: Well, that's very modest of you, but I'm sure that's not true.

DM: Well, it says in the Bible, "What is he who conquers a city compared with him who overcomes his own nature?" So the thing about Hollywood is: there it is. I mean there's nothing hidden about Hollywood. It's what it is. And —

BS: Well, I think a lot of people go there with that attitude and hope that they can overcome but find it's just an avalanche of one form of moron telling you how much they love your work when they buy it and then how much it has to change in order to be made into a movie.

DM: Yeah, but to try to change Hollywood is like someone who goes out to work for the Ford Motor Company and says, 'You know, we should really invest in public transportation because it makes a lot more sense."

the verdict

BS: I see your point. Let's talk a little about your early screenplays. I love The Verdict. How did you get that job?

DM: I got the job for The Verdict...I was hired by Zanuck and Brown to write a movie based on a book by Barry Reed, a lawyer in Boston, Mass. And it's based on an actual case. They had me write the movie, and they didn't like it. They were very polite about it. They paid me. They said, "We just don't like it, and, if you'd like to write it again, we'd pay you again." They did. I said, "That's very flattering, but I couldn't write anything differently."

And so the project went on, and they hired several other well-known writers, and I became morose and sent a copy to Sidney Lumet, who I knew in passing, just to get someone else's opinion, hoping he would praise it. And the good fairy descended. The director, who was going to be, I believe, Robert Redford, dropped out of the project when they were committed to making the movie, and they sent the scripts they had commissioned — not mine — to Sidney Lumet. They never sent him my script. And coincidentally, that same week I'd sent him my script, and he called them back and said, "I'd love to do the movie. I'm just going to do Dave's screenplay." And, lo and behold, the day was saved.

BS: Wow.

DM: You know, one time in thirty years, what the hell?

BS: Well, the difference between movies and theater, as far as writers are concerned, is the difference between a medium that values the writer and one that kind of undervalues the writer. I'm wondering, since there has to be some kind of adjustment for a playwright who gets to write the way he wants to when he goes to Hollywood, how that changes the writing.

DM: Well, it's a completely different medium. One of the fascinating things about writing is that, when you write for radio, radio is different from stage, and stage is different from television, television is different from movies. They're all different. And it's like the poker player who says, "I sat down at this game, and they were playing deuces wild. And you had to trade in a one-eyed Jack on another card. I can't play that game." Well, if you can't play the game, you shouldn't play the game.

The point for the poker player is to understand the rules of the game, and for the writer to understand the essential nature of the medium — if he or she can — because each is very, very different. Writing movies and writing plays are extraordinarily different endeavors. Application and study would probably help anybody understand them a bit, but to say, "I don't know why they don't like my plays when I wrote movies well," is like saying, "I don't know why I'm not winning at indian poker when I can play five-card stud." You got to understand the rules of the game.

BS: I thought after I saw The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Verdict - I lived in Chicago and saw quite a lot of your work — that in your writing movies and having to fulfill dictates of a much more market-oriented medium, which Hollywood turns out, there would be more plot, there would be more structure, and that it might change your plays as well. And I thought it did. Did you?

DM: I think it absolutely did. Thank you. When you write a movie, when one writers a movie, that's all a movie is, is plot. All that you and I care about when we watch a movie is what happens next. And it's told with pictures. And the pictures go by at twenty-four frames a second. And we get the idea pretty damned quickly. There's nobody here who can't come into a movie or television show at any point and understand in a tenth of a second what's happening. And so what moves a movie along is plot. What happens next. "Oh yes," the audience says. "Oh my God, now he or she has gotten into an even worse scrape. Let me sit here a little longer and figure out what happens next." So, when I start writing movies, I had to really feverishly apply myself to understanding, to learning, how to write a plot. And I think it very much affected my plays for the better.

BS: Tell me. Was there an enlightening moment when you first realized that the theater had some power, had something that you wanted to be a part of?

DM: I think that moment was the moment when I first realized that it wasn't work and that people could go there and never work. I figured out that I had found the circus and I just wasn't going home. And I found it very young. My Uncle Henry, who lived out here for a while — and his wife, my Aunt Esther, still lives out here with that part of the family — was a producer of radio and television in Chicago for the Chicago Board of Rabbis. And he gave me jobs as a kid and my sister jobs as a kid, portraying Jewish children on television and radio. And through him I got into community theater in Chicago.

BS: It was a stretch —

DM: What?

BS: — portraying Jewish children.

DM: That's right.

American Buffalo 

BS: Isaac Bashevis Singer was once asked if he believed in free will and he said, "Yes, I have no choice", which sounds like something from one of your movies. You seem to believe in fate. No matter what your characters do, they seem bound up in a fate that's decided already by their class and by what neighborhood they're from and their childhoods. I'm wondering if you think very much much in those terms when you're writing these characters.

DM: No, I never think about fate because, as we all know, "Fate is the fool's word for chance." Right? No?

BS: And why wouldn't that enter into your writing?

DM: Nobody saw that movie? Oh my God, where are you people from? Yeah, The Gay Divorcee. Eric Blore. Fred Astaire. "Fate is the fool's world for chance." Oh my God, where am I? No, Aristotle, used to say —

BS: You used to hear him say this?

DM: That's right. Aristotle used to say, until someone would tell him to shut up, he used to say that character is fate. So tragedy is about character, which is about the capacity for the human being to make choices. And Don Marquis, who wrote Archy and Mehitabel, said — and I think Isaac Bashevis Singer may have been cribbing from him — that the ultimate reconciliation of the doctrine of free will and predestination is we're free to do whatever we want and whatever we choose is going to be wrong. And that's what tragedy is about.

BS: Well, religion seems to be another circumscribing factor for your characters. In The Old Religion, Leo Frank. And in Homicide, the movie that you wrote and directed Joe Mantegna plays a police offer who's kind of forced to face his Judaism, something he's apparently denied or ignored. You've recently returned, or stopped —

DM: Yeah, I think that's a fairly accurate description, sure.

BS: And how did that change things for you?

DM: Well, it made me happier.

BS: Really?

DM: Sure.

BS: How?

DM: Well, in very many ways. It's a great thing to be able to put down the intolerable burdens of, if one happens to be me, of arrogance, egoism, and self-absorption for a while.

BS: All that from Judaism?

DM: Sure. I have this great rabbi — his name is Larry Kushner — who has this magnificent congregation in Sudbury, Massachusetts. And on Yom Kippur he said, "The bad news is you're going to be here all day. The good news is you've got no place to go."

BS: So, he's a comedian. But how does this help you overcome arrogance and those other burdens?

DM: Well, there's two answers to that question. A-ha, right? And one of them is that the rabbis would say, "Whoever rises refreshed from his prayers, his prayers have been answered." And other equally nonresponsive answer is that the rabbis would say, "put on teffilin, put on tallis, hold a prayerbook in your hand. Now, sin."

BS: It's better that way. So, that's what you've been doing?

DM: Yeah, sure.

BS: Well, good. Was it a surprise to your children?

DM: I don't think so. No. After growing up with me, I think very little surprises them.

BS: Oh, I see. In Homicide the Bobby Gold/Joe Mantegna character says, "There's so much anti-Semitism these last four thousand years. We must be doing something." Did you feel that way?

DM: No, certainly not. But I heard people say that one. I heard Jews make a similar comment. the book I wrote, The Old Religion, is about the Leo Frank case. Leo Frank was lynched in 1915. He was falsely accused of a crime that was fairly evident he didn't commit. The city of Atlanta and the state of Georgia and much of the South imploded in a one-man pogrom and identified Frank as this demon and decided he was a demon because he was a Jew.

And it was the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, which had died out after the Reconstruction, and also the birth of the Anti-Defamation League. It was a show trial, and one of the many "Crimes of the Century.' It was called the "American Dreyfus" case. And I wrote a book about my imagined interior monologue in the persona of Leo Frank, a man who goes to work one day and comes home to find out he's a monster that the world wants to kill and the process he goes through trying to find out why that is true. It's a book about race hatred. And of the things that he experiments with in an attempt to explain to himself a world gone mad is that, perhaps, there is some rectitude in the libels of his accusers. I think that that's something many abused people — children, for example — adopt to deal with intolerable injustice. So, no, that's not something that I feel.

BS: I'm wondering how aware of your Judaism you were as a child growing up. Because it's another kind of outside, and you ended up becoming a writer.

DM: Well, I was pretty aware of it. As I said, my Uncle Henry worked for the Board of Rabbis. My grandparents all came from the Old Country, from Russian Poland. We were fairly Episcopal Reform as far as religious practice went. And the kids from the other side of the tracks used to come over once in a while and hit us on the head, call us all sorts of derogatory terms. But I didn't see a lot of upside in the proposition until I got older.

BS: I wanted to talk a little bit about your book about acting, True and False.

DM: Sure.

BS: The most staggering thing to me that you say in the book is this tip to the actor: If the audience enjoyed the play, you have done a good job. That just sounds like pandering to me. Does this mean that The Bridges of Madison County is a good book?

DM: That very well may be. I haven't read it.

BS: Trust me on this.

DM: If the audience enjoys the play, the actor has done their job, because the audience pays to come to enjoy the play. See actors, as another maligned subspecies of humanity love to flagellate themselves, because it takes free-floating anxiety and transforms it into a yummy little phobia: that it's not the world is bad, it's not that my teachers are worthless, that the critics are mannerless swine, it's not that the plays are no good, but, rather, that I am insufficiently prepared. And, if I just try harder, everything will come out well, and there will be no tears before bedtime.

BS: You don't know actors that use those other excuses, too?

DM: What other excuses?

BS: Those ones that you said it's not.

DM: I'm saying that most actors use those excuses. I've very seldom met an actor — and I've worked with the greatest actors in the world and am greatly privileged to do so — who didn't say, at one time or another, when you said, "Jeez, you were great," "Naw, I wasn't very good tonight." It's a terrible thing to say. It's an insult to the person paying the compliment, and more important, it's an insult to yourself. The audience comes to hear the play. If they had a good time, you did your job. If you know who to do something better, do it better tomorrow night.

BS: But isn't it possible for people to enjoy something that really isn't any good?

DM: Sure, I do. Don't you?

BS: Yes, but we're talking about what a good actor is.

DM: If the audience enjoyed the play, the actor did their job because the jobs of the actor is to communicate the play to the audience. The job of the actor is not to obtain some magical, mystical state of perfection in him — or herself. It's nothing but self-consciousness. It's heresy. And it's the heresy of people who've been exposed to just a little too much education and haven't had enough time trying to earn their living by it.

BS: Well, you talk about a formal education not only being useless to an actor but harmful. You say that it generally ruins a young actor.

DM: That's right. That's absolutely right. For several reasons. The first is, show business smiles on early entry. That the things you can do when you're sixteen and seventeen and eighteen because you have a lot of time on your hands; you don't need a lot to live; you can't do when you're twenty-eight and twenty-nine and thirty. You should be out there getting your teeth kicked in and learning something and meeting some people and working hard.

Scott Zigler, a great, great director, directed my play The Old Neighborhood that Carole Hays produced, which just opened on Broadway last night, and he also teaches at Harvard. He's a great, great teacher. he says to the kids, "Get out there. And if you go to work for nothing in the movie business, if you do two movies for nothing" (he's talking about on the technical end), "you can be gainfully employed for the rest of your life." And it's true. The movie business particularly smiles on people who are reliable, dedicated and hard-working.

BS: But not necessarily good.

DM: But why should they be good? Why should anybody be  good when they're sixteen, seventeen and eighteen? You gotta get out there and be bad.

BS: Yeah, but sometimes they don't get better.

DM: Well.

BS: Isn't that possible?

DM: Yes. But they're not going to get better in school, and here's the reason why. Acting is something that's done for a paying public. It's not something that's done for school administrators and for teachers. the skills needed to please an acting teacher, a casting agent, a school administrator, are those that are completely opposite from the skills needed to please an audience. The audience — just like you and me- comes to the theater to be delighted, to be surprised, and to give everyone the benefit of the doubt  because they want to have a good time. The teacher, the administrator, and the casting agent come to the session as if to greet a thief who's going to be underprepared and rob them of their time.

An audience isn't judgmental. That's why they come. That's why I come. That's why you come. There's nothing one is going to learn in school except to pander to authority. And the learning to pander to authority not only wastes the individual's time but ill equips the individual to deal with the authority of the greater world that is going to continue to exploit him or her. The casting agent, the fraudulent teachers, the people who take the headshots, the unskilled teachers of voice who are going to say, "Sit still and stay in class for the next million years, and I will tell you when you're any good." It's an absolute fraud.

BS: But that pandering to authority, isn't that to the detriment of anybody who wants to do anything, not necessarily be an actor?

DM: Not if they want to be a teacher.

BS: There's one.

DM: I've got some very good friends who are home schoolers, and they say the benefit of spending enough time in an institution is that eventually you get to be one of the guards.

BS: Another thing you say about actors, you tell them not to interpret. You say that to create the illusion the actor has to undergo nothing at all.

DM: That's right.

BS: What if you're a shy person trying to play a bore? Is there some kind of mock transformation that you have to go through in order to muster up whatever?

DM: No, you have to say words.

BS: And that's it?

DM: That's it.

BS: From this point of view, how can you tell a good actor from a bad actor?

DM: A good actor is one whose performance you enjoy. I mean, if you want to get more technical, I would say a good actor to me is one whose performance I enjoy because I find it truthful. Which is to say, I enjoy the performance.

BS: Well, that's not necessarily the most truthful performance. That's just the one you enjoyed.

DM: It's the most truthful performance to me. To whom else am I going to refer to it? If you're making love to someone, you say, "Jeez, I feel great." They say, "Yeah, I'm going to do better next time."

BS: Well, if you're playing to an audience of sadists and you really screw up in front of them, they'll enjoy that.

DM: The objections that you're raising, they're moot points. You can't argue them. But at the end of the the theater is a profession of mountebanks and misfits, much like myself, who've come in through the back door because no one else would have them and learned to find a place in society by getting up on a stage and doing plays that people need to hear and doing them well in an interesting, provocative, and unusual manner. Who haven't had the life bred out of them.

I've been teaching off and on since I was a kid, in many, many institutions, in the English departments and the drama departments, and all that I can tell you is — only I alone am escaped to tell thee — it's a big shock. You want to learn to act, go act. Go start a theater company. Go apprentice yourself. Go carry coffee. Go take voice lessons. And get up on the stage. You're going to be bad for the first x years anyway. You might as well be bad from sixteen to twenty rather than from twenty-eight to thirty-five.

BS: You also talk about how you're very much against interpretation of the text. In another book I was reading, you refer to a rabbi who points out that as one studies the Torah, the same portions at the same time of year, year after year, that one sees in them a change. But, as they do not change, it must be you who is changing. And that made me think that, isn't that another way of saying that the text has a depth that reveals itself through studying and interpretation?

DM: If one is studying the text. On the other hand, for an actor, the text reveals itself to the audience through the juxtaposition of the uninflected words, which the author wrote, and the moment-to-moment truthfulness of the actor. I don't want to hear some actor's good ideas. I and you and everyone here has the capacity to go to the library and understand what the author meant. What the actor can contribute, which is a great contribution, is the organic moment-to-moment, back and forth, the Ping-Pong game of the unforeseen.

What does it mean of somebody of whom we say they have a great technique? Of a chef of whom we say they have a great technique? It means you didn't enjoy that dinner.

BS: Why?

DM: Why? Whoever said that of a dinner they enjoyed? What we say of a dinner we enjoyed is "Yum." And what we say of a performance we enjoyed is, "Gol-ly!" We don't say, "What technique." We say "What technique' when we have been defrauded of anything more enjoyable. So we appreciate our own ability to appreciate.

BS: So, you would call a performance by Meryl Streep doing one of her accents or Dustin Hoffman in Rain Main or De Niro doing Awakenings —

DM: First of all, I'm not going to name names because it's not my job, and my taste is not the point. Everyone has his or her taste, and they're entitled to it. That's what you're entitled to when you buy a ticket. You're there to see the show. You get to make up your own mind. Let me ask you a question. What is the line, "I never want to see you again." What does that line mean?

BS: It depends.

DM: Exactly. That's exactly correct.

BS: Thank you.

DM: It depends on what's happening in the moment. It can mean any number of a million things. And just so, when the line is spoken on stage, it can mean any number of a million things. As I say in the book, for any actor to prepare what he or she thinks the "character is going through" and then bring that onto the stage is an error of the same magnitude for the basketball team to say, "We're going to go out, and we're going to perform these plays irrespective of what the other team is doing."

BS: Well, what about Horowitz interpreting Chopin? is that any different from an actor interpreting Mamet?

DM: Well, it depends. It's a very good example. There are some pianists whose technique is so good they just bore you to death. One would rather hear a twelve-year-old who wanted to play the music. And I would, too, of the actors. I would rather hear somebody who wanted to get on stage and mix it up a little bit than someone who's going to share with me his or her good ideas about the text.

It's not the actor's job to be interesting. It's the actor's job to be extraordinary brave and forthright. And, when I was a kid growing up, we used to say the best thing you could say about an actor was that he or she was dangerous. That's what people want in the theater. You know, we look at early performances of Brando. You look at something Joey Mantegna did. You look at Patti LuPone in this play on Broadway. You say, "Gee, where they hell did they come from? Man, I never could have thought of that." Exactly. you know, you see Whoopi Goldberg when she was doing her comedy on stage —

BS: I never could have thought of what?

DM: Whatever the actor —

BS: The way they were doing it.

DM: Yeah. And neither could they.

BS: Well, isn't that their interpretation?

DM: No, it's their performance.

BS: Could you elaborate on that?

DM: Yes. Stanislavski said there are three kinds of actors. There's the actor who's gonna be the hack actor and give you his or her version of what they think an actor would do in this role. They're gonna interpret other actors. And then there's the mechanical actor, who gives you their version of what they think their character would be like. They're gonna think it up. They're gonna practice in front of the mirror, and they're gonna bring it in. And then there's the organic actor, who's simply going to determine what is needed in the scene and then go on and do whatever they can to get that from the other person.

Now, a good example of this organic behavior is a child who doesn't want to go to bed. A lover who wants a second chance. A man or woman who wants a job. Somebody who wants to get laid. There's nothing that these people won't do. And that's called having an objective. Having an objective is just a fancy word for wanting something real, real bad. And when all of us — or any of us — are in these situations, there's nothing we won't do. All of our attention's on the other person. And we'll change horses in the middle of the stream to do anything to get them to give us what we want. Now, when you see that in an actor on stage it's awfully damned compelling. Because what the great actor's doing on stage is changing his or her tactics to get what they need from the other person on stage, rather than performing what they dreamed up at home.

William H. Macy in Oleanna

BS: Isn't that technique, though?

DM: No.

BS: It seems to me that it is for this reason: if you're trained, part of your training is to be constantly aware of your opportunities on stage, and one of them means, "I must change tactics when called for." Rather than going out there every time without any understanding of what may happen, you have the understanding already, and you're ready for it and can do it.

DM: One doesn't have to be constantly trained to be aware of all the opportunities on stage any more than one has to be constantly trained to be aware of all the opportunities in trying to talk a cop of a traffic ticket. We're born with this capacity.

BS: Some people are better at it than others, though.

DM: Exactly so. And some people are better actors than others. But it's an innate capacity to be imaginative. And what's needed in the actor is not these dull whips of authority with which we flagellate ourselves of concentration and discipline and technique. Who cares? What's needed is bravery and intelligence and imagination. And all of us have all of that we need.

BS: But, as you say, the addition of emotion and all that kind of stuff is not something you want to see in your actors.

DM: It's false. It's lying. There's nothing anyone can do to control his or her emotions. If there were, we wouldn't need psychiatrists.

BS: I wonder. I don't really agree with that. If —

DM: Did anyone ever tell you, "Cheer up"?

BS: Yes.

DM: What was your reaction?

BS: Let me ask you this. What if you, right now, were suicidally sad, but you decided for the hour and a half it would take you to promote your book on this tour that you could set that aside. And then, when you knew it was going to be over, you go back to your room and cry and shoot yourself or whatever. I think that —

DM: That's not manipulating emotions. That's having an objective. The two things are very, very, very different.

BS: Well, that's semantics.

DM: What?

BS: Certainly it's manipulating your emotions. I think that the theory that one can control one's emotions and urges for short periods of time is the basis of the philosophy of teaching children good manners.

DM: No, what they child controls is not what he or she feels. What they control, if they can—

BS: Is behavior. That can look like emotions.

DM: Well, it might look like emotions to you, but there's nothing a human being can do to control their emotions. Cults function by suggesting to a human being that this control is possible and then shaming them when they find that it's not. That's how a cult functions. And when psychiatry becomes a cult, as it can, or a religion, as it can, that's how it functions. Or an acting class or any kind of class.

To say to the individual, "I've asked you to do something. Now why can't you do it?" The individual gets the idea that he or she is bad, and the only cure for the inherent badness is to work harder, to, in fact, enslave themselves to, and in the case of acting schools, to the teacher. And I've seen it for thirty years, and it's a vast imposition on the acting student. And, it's a fraud. There's nothing that the human being can do, to control their feelings, to control their emotions. and it may be practiced unwittingly, and it may be practiced for the best of all possible reasons, but it, nonetheless, is a fraud perpetrated on the student.

"From the Mouth of Gabriel" - Sufjan Stevens (mp3)

"Heirloom" - Sufjan Stevens (mp3)

"Arnika" - Sufjan Stevens (mp3)

In Which It Was As Important To Me As Anything of Mine

Something To Do With the Sofa

The conversations of the critic Mel Gussow and the playwright Harold Pinter are weird mostly because Pinter is an actor, and accustomed to a certain kind of pretension. He was an actor even before he was a playwright, and he never really liked interviews. Gussow feels the need to pin him down on a number of things, and Pinter acts like a terse little ninja. His ejaculations, elicited by one of his greatest admirers in the theatrical world, contain nuggets of prose as self-centered and yet as enduring as any literature has to offer. - A.C.

MEL GUSSOW: Could you trace the genesis of Old Times?

HAROLD PINTER: I think I wrote it last winter. Yes, last winter. About a year ago. Well, there's nothing I can tell you about that because it was just a very odd thing really. It was one of those times when you think you're never going to write again. I was lying on the sofa reading the paper and something flashed in my mind. It wasn't anything to do with the paper.

MG: Something to do with the sofa?

HP: The sofa perhaps, but certainly not the paper. I rushed upstairs to my room. I live in a very tall house. I usually find great difficulty getting to the top. But, like lightning, I was up.

MG: What was the thought?

HP: I think it was the first couple of lines of the play. I don't know if they were actually the first lines. Two people talking about someone else. But then I really went at it. Incidentally, you did ask me for my "fourth." Actually what it is is reading. I read a great deal of poetry.

MG: What poets?

HP: Recently I rediscovered Pope. I haven't read him since school. Lines and verses are always on my mind. Donne. Gerard Manley Hopkins. "Margaret/ Are you grieving/ over Goldengrove/ unleaving." Modern poetry. Philip Larkin. Yeats and Eliot.

MG: Do you still write poetry — as poetry?

HP: Yes. I've written two poems in the last couple of years. Very short. I wrote one about six months ago, about seven lines, but I remember I did 13 drafts of it.

MG: How many drafts of plays do you usually write?

HP: About three. But that was as important to me as anything of mine - that poem. But you know any poem is — emotionally. I used to write a great deal of poetry a long time ago.

MG: It does seem to me, again about the last three plays, that they're more lyrical. Is that something you're aware of?

HP: Yes, I am aware of it. I think it's very dangerous territory.

MG: Why is it dangerous territory?

HP: You can fall on your arse very easily in attempting to express in, if you like, "lyrical" terms what is actually happening to people. You can over ... I did it, in Silence, but I cut it. I had a passage. It was very very interesting, actually. When I wrote it, I sent the play, as I always do, to Samuel Beckett, whose opinion, to put it mildly, I respect. And... I know him.

MG: Do you always send him your plays?

HP: I began, I think, with The Homecoming. Yes, I do always. And he writes the most succinct observations. He liked Silence very much. He wrote, I remember, one very short remark, something to the effect, 'Suggest you examine or reconsider speech, fourth speech, page five.' Or whatever it was. So I looked at this speech immediately, and thought, well, I don't see anything wrong with that. What do I have to reconsider? It seems to me perfectly in order. But I'll keep it in mind. I will bear this matter in mind. I wrote to him and said, thank you, but about this speech I'll listen to it in rehearsals, and see what I think of it. Rehearsals started, and I heard it, and I thought it was perfectly all right. Then, after about two week's rehearsal, Peter Hall came up to me — I hadn't been around for a few days — and said, 'There's one speech in this play that I do not think is working at all.' And that was that speech. Off I went and heard it properly again and realized that, of course, Beckett was totally right.

with james fox & joseph losey

MG: Why wasn't it working?

HP: Well, because...it simply went over the top in lyricism. The trouble was that it was basically inaccurate and non-specific and, I think, that is the problem trying to use language in this way. It has to be absolutely specific. If it's at all generalized then it's nothing else but indulgence and it's illegitimate. This applies to the use of any kind of language in any kind of context, but particularly the kind of language you were referring to in these latest plays.

MG: Do you feel that you have to guard against emotion?

HP: I don't quite understand you.

MG: Do you not want to get carried away by something you don't control? Something you cannot do with the accuracy you demand? Silence. The idea of lyricism denotes to me a kind of emotion.

HP: What I'm interested in is emotion which is contained, and felt very, very deeply. Jesus, I really don't want to make a categorical statement about this. But, perhaps, it is ultimately inexpressible. Because I think we express our emotions in so many small ways, all over the place - or can't express them in any other way.

MG: This would seem to be a lesson to be learned from Beckett, who without demonstrating obvious emotion can be quite emotional.

HP: Yes, with such simplicity of means.

MG: I remember years ago when you wrote about how much Beckett meant to you, at the time you were referring to his novels. How do you feel about his plays?

HP: What can I say?

MG: Do you feel at all as pupil to master?

HP: No, not as pupil to master. I think he's the most remarkable writer in the world, that's what I feel. I don't feel pupil to master, for a start, because I don't see where I relate to him at all.

performing 'Krapp's Last Tape' 

MG: Some people think you do, particularly in the last three plays.

HP: Well, let them say...this terrible business of categorizing. I don't feel that on just one letter alone, apart from anything else. I feel that his achievements, what he's been able to do in his life, in his writing, are so far beyond my own that I don't see any kind of comparison at all. I think he's a great writer. And I'm certainly not that in the way I understand the term, and I do understand the term. The term has a very clear meaning to me. I can tell you who I think are great writers very simply. They're so evident. They're obvious.

MG: Name some obvious.

HP: Well, Doestoevski. This is in my mind. Joyce, Proust. They haven't got their names for nothing. And Beckett. Silence.

MG: It is something to strive for, isn't it?

HP: I don't see it in those terms. I don't have that kind of ambition. I mean you can't strive to be a Great Writer.

beckett with buster keaton

MG: You can strive to be better.

HP: Always strive to be better. One curious element I find in what is called 'literary life' which I notice. I must say particularly in New York — there's an extraordinary competitiveness. But I must say quite honestly that it is something I have never felt remotely. I'm just not an ambitious person.

MG: What first set you to writing plays? Was there something specific that kicked off The Room, your very first play?

HP: Oh, yes. I know the image. I know what happened. I was at a party in a house and I was taken for some reason or other to be introduced to a man who lived on the top floor, or an upper floor, and went into his room. He was a slender, middle-aged man in his bare feet who was walking about the room. Very sociable and pleasant, and he was making bacon and eggs, and cut bread, and poured tea and gave it to this fellow who was reading a comic. And in the meantime he was talking to us - very, very quickly and lightly. We only had about five minutes but something like that remained. I told a friend I'd like to write a play, there's some play here. And then it all happened. I used to write a great deal of prose in the past, when I was young. And a lot of it, including a novel [The Dwarfs] was in dialogue.

MG: To go back, for a minute, what did Beckett say about Old Times?

HP: Well, he was...very much in favor of it. He did have one reservation, one speech. No, I'm not going to tell which one it was.

MG: Is it still in?

HP: It's in.

MG: Same reason?

HP: No, not the same reason. But I stuck with it. I've no alternative but to stick with it.

MG: Peter Hall didn't spot it?

HP: No. Mind you, it hasn't been an easy one. I must confess that.

MG: Does Beckett send you his plays?

HP: He isn't writing any. He sends me his books, but I never - I'm not in the same position at all. In other words, I don't send him back my notes. I'm very happy to have his. I wouldn't dream of it. Anyway, I have no notes, no notes at all.

MG: When did you first meet Beckett?

HP: From about the age of 19 I started to read him, the novels, and I was quite bowled over by those novels. When we did The Caretaker in Paris in 1961, Roger Blin was in it, and one day he said, 'Would you like to meet Beckett?' It was almost too much for me — the thought of such a thing. I had written to him. Eventually. You can imagine. It was 1949 when I started to read Beckett and I didn't manage to write to him until about 1959 — when I wrote him just a short note trying to say what I - something. And got an extremely nice letter back. So then I was in a position of meeting him. The longshot of it is that I came into this hotel and he was very vigorous and chatty and extremely affable and extremely friendly and we spent the whole night together. And that was really...very good. And since then, we've really seen quite a lot of one another.

MG: How do you feel about other playwrights?

HP: Well, my taste is quite catholic. I do enjoy a great deal of writers. I think...Edward Bond is a very good writer...I've always liked Edward Albee's work. I like Heathcote Williams. When you ask me that kind of question, there are people I could tell you but they suddenly slip my mind.

MG: Kafka's on your list with Joyce, Proust, and Doestoevski.

HP: Oh, yes. Definitely. I'd like to have had a drink with Kafka, too.

MG: What novelists?

HP: I don't read many modern novels. I do find my reading goes back to Nazi Germany. I read a lot about Nazi Germany. At the moment I'm reading a biography of Heidegger. It's not my field, but I take an interest. Before that, I read a biography of Wittgenstein, which just came out. Heidegger became a Nazi apologist. He was a Nazi. I think the whole period is probably the worst thing that ever happened.

MG: Reunion is the only time you've dealt even indirectly with the Holocaust?

HP: Yes.

MG: Would you ever write about it?

HP: I don't know. There's something in me that wants to do something about it. It's so difficult.

MG: Do you go to the movies often?

HP: Not often. You know American movies meant an awful lot to me. I was brought up on them. I had a very rich cinematic education, much more than the theatre. I never went to the theatre.

MG: What movies did you see?

HP: I'm talking about the 1940s. I saw all the American black and white gangster films, which were great.

MG: Your next project is writing a screenplay of Kafka's The Trial. Why The Trial at this time?

HP: I read The Trial when I was a lad of 18, in 1948. It's been with me ever since. I don't think anyone who reads The Trial - it ever leaves them, although it can be curiously distorted by time. Speaking to a number of people, who remember having read it when they were young, they look back and think it's a political book. They rather tend to think it's like Arthur Koestler. In my view, it isn't at all. I admire Koestler, but I wouldn't be interested in writing a screenplay of Darkness at Noon, because it's so specifically of its time and place. But The Trial is not that case at all. I find it very difficult to talk about, except that it has been with me for 40 years, and I've had a whale of a time over the last few months entering into Kafka's world. The nightmare of that world is precisely in its ordinariness. That is what is so frightening and strong.

MG: And you are certainly aware of Orson Welles' film.

HP: Yes. Orson Welles was a genius but I think his film was quite wrong because he made it into an incoherent nightmare of spasmodic half-adjusted lines, images, effects in fact. As I said, I don't think Kafka is at all about effect, effect, but about something that happens on Monday, and then on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday and then right through the week. This man in The Trial is arrested one morning in his bed by two people and he is then let out, he goes to his job, a case is taking place. There seems to be a kind of implacable but invisible force and he is finally executed. The important thing about it is that he fights like hell all the way along the line. It reminded me of the shot in John Ford's film The Grapes of Wrath, when the man is protecting his shack when the tractor comes up: 'If you go any further, I'll shoot your head off.' The fellow takes off his goggles and says, 'There's no point doing that because I'm going to knock your house down. I'm getting paid for that and if I don't do it there'll be another guy who will.' He says, 'I'll still knock your head off.' 'Then you'll have to shoot the other guy's head off. you've got to go to the bank in Oklahoma City, and you'll have to shoot all of them. Then you'll have to go to the bank in New York. How many people can you shoot?' He says, 'Get out of my damn way,' and he knocks the house down. One of the most terrible sequences in cinema, in a wonderful film. That's what Kafka's looking at: who do you shoot?

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