Didn't know until this week that Pinter wrote his silences into the text as two different things — Pause is one instruction, Silence is another and longer one — and that actors still argue about how much air sits between them. Dark house, a line lands, nobody says anything, and you start hearing the seats creak and somebody's coat. That gap is on the page. It was always meant to be work.
Cut to May 1958, the Lyric in Hammersmith. The Birthday Party, his first full-length play, opens and the notices are mostly unkind, the house is thin, and it comes off after a week. Harold Hobson wrote admiringly of it in the Sunday Times, but by the time the paper was out the run had finished — the praise arrived at an empty building. I've a soft spot for that kind of week. I've run pictures to four people in the stalls and the curtains going back anyway, full ceremony, because the machine doesn't know how many are out there.
He was born in Hackney in 1930, a tailor's son, and he kept at it for another fifty years — the screenplays, the directing, the acting, the Nobel in 2005. The flop stayed in the record and so did the play. Both still get revived.
"Pinteresque" got into the dictionaries while he was still writing, which he said he didn't care for — being turned into an adjective before you're finished must feel like being shelved under Reference. I've a secondhand Birthday Party with a theatre stub tucked in; somebody went, anyway.
Constance, he spent years in rep touring under the name David Baron, learning from the inside exactly how long an actor can stand there before the house gets nervous. A player who's counted bars knows where the rest goes.