The Richard Imison Award is an award which recognises the best radio drama, generally by a writer new to the industry, and is now awarded as part of the BBC Audio Drama Awards . It was established in 1994 and commemorates the life and work of Richard Imison .
130-536: Richard Imison was Script Editor for BBC Radio Drama from 1963 to 1991. In the thirty years that Imison worked for BBC Radio Drama it was the largest patron of original creative dramatic writing in Britain. In his role as Script Editor no other single individual therefore had as much influence in either the discovery of new talent or the encouragement of established writers such as Edward Albee, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Alexander Gelman, Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett in
260-409: A "Bianca" but even there his future plans do not feature her. We learn that his problem with constipation has been ongoing since at least this time. He disparages his youth and is glad it is over. The thirty-nine-year-old Krapp estimates that the tape he had been listening to was made some ten or twelve years earlier. If it was twelve then he would have been twenty-seven at the time it was recorded. "In
390-593: A character that Pinter described as "a very civilised man ... a man of great sensibility but in fact, he's upholding and sustaining a totally brutal system [the slave trade] from which he derives his money"; and Uncle Benny, opposite Pierce Brosnan and Geoffrey Rush , in The Tailor of Panama (2001). In television films , he played Mr. Bearing, the father of ovarian cancer patient Vivian Bearing, played by Emma Thompson in Mike Nichols 's HBO film of
520-611: A comedy, like his earlier comedies of menace . Pinter played the major role of Roote in a 1995 revival at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester . Pinter's brief dramatic sketch Precisely (1983) is a duologue between two bureaucrats exploring the absurd power politics of mutual nuclear annihilation and deterrence . His first overtly political one-act play is One for the Road (1984). In 1985 Pinter stated that whereas his earlier plays presented metaphors for power and powerlessness,
650-592: A drunk Irish journalist in Langrishe, Go Down (starring Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons ) distributed on BBC Two in 1978 and released in movie theatres in 2002. Pinter's later film roles included the criminal Sam Ross in Mojo (1997), written and directed by Jez Butterworth , based on Butterworth's play of the same name ; Sir Thomas Bertram (his most substantial feature-film role) in Mansfield Park (1998),
780-537: A few days before his death, Beckett said that he "did not remember the scene this way, however, denying that girl in the boat ... had anything at all to do with his cousin, Peggy." Knowlson feels "that there is little doubt the source for the girl with the haunting eyes is Ethna MacCarthy. For, as Dream of Fair to Middling Women had made clear ... the 'Alba', who, on Beckett’s own admission, was closely modelled on Ethna, had eyes like dark, deep pools." Beckett left no doubt however when he told Jean Martin, whilst rehearsing
910-499: A few poems, a collection of short stories and the novel, Murphy . Beckett had this to say about the drained old man we see onstage: "Krapp sees very clearly that he’s through with his work, with love and religion." He told Rick Cluchey , whom he directed in 1977, that Krapp was "in no way senile [but has] something frozen about him [and is] filled up to his teeth with bitterness." "Habit, the great deadener" has proven more tenacious than inspiration. His "present concerns revolve around
1040-401: A ledger to find a certain tape, but the words alone are not jogging his memory. He takes childish pleasure in saying the word ‘spool’. The tape dates from the day he turned 39. His recorded voice says that he has just celebrated the occasion alone "at the wine house," jotting down notes in preparation for the later recording session. "The new light above my table is a great improvement," states
1170-759: A medical examination, before his CO registration was ultimately agreed. He had a small part in the Christmas pantomime Dick Whittington and His Cat at the Chesterfield Hippodrome in 1949 to 1950. From January to July 1951, he attended the Central School of Speech and Drama . From 1951 to 1952, he toured Ireland with the Anew McMaster repertory company, playing over a dozen roles. In 1952, he began acting in regional English repertory productions; from 1953 to 1954, he worked for
1300-475: A most successful performance (with Martin Held as Krapp). The first American performance, on 14 January 1960, was directed by Alan Schneider and starred Donald Davis . The curtain rises on a "late evening in the future." Krapp, an old man, is sitting in his den in the dark, lit by a light above his desk. On his desk are a tape recorder and a number of tins containing reels of recorded tape. He reads aloud from
1430-624: A note of their names. Pinter himself and later critics generally credited Hobson as bolstering him and perhaps even rescuing his career. In a review published in 1958, borrowing from the subtitle of The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace , a play by David Campton , critic Irving Wardle called Pinter's early plays " comedy of menace "—a label that people have applied repeatedly to his work. Such plays begin with an apparently innocent situation that becomes both threatening and " absurd " as Pinter's characters behave in ways often perceived as inexplicable by his audiences and one another. Pinter acknowledges
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#17327980174121560-466: A play in which dark and light imagery is central," as "in the margin of the text that he used for the 1973 London production," on page 15 where the word 'chrysolite' occurs ... he writes: If heaven would make me such another world Of one entire and perfect chrysolite I’d not have sold her for it Othello V2. "Like Othello, too," Pountney continues, "Krapp has lost his love through his own folly." Beckett’s mother, May, died on 25 August 1950 in
1690-414: A play that Pinter developed from his 1963 short story, first broadcast on BBC TV in 1965. Working as both a screenwriter and as a playwright, Pinter composed a script called The Compartment (1966), for a trilogy of films to be contributed by Samuel Beckett , Eugène Ionesco , and Pinter, of which only Beckett's film, titled Film , was actually produced. Then Pinter turned his unfilmed script into
1820-579: A play, Woolf asked him to write it so that he could direct it to fulfill a requirement for his postgraduate work. Pinter wrote it in three days. The production was described by Billington as "a staggeringly confident debut which attracted the attention of a young producer, Michael Codron , who decided to present Pinter's next play, The Birthday Party , at the Lyric Hammersmith , in 1958." Written in 1957 and produced in 1958, Pinter's second play, The Birthday Party , one of his best-known works,
1950-488: A proxy for him, the action is set in the future. The first line of the play explicitly sets it 'in the future', although nothing onstage reveals this. Beckett wrote this play shortly before he turned 52 years old. As it happens, with Waiting for Godot , success had found him but, at 39, the future must have seemed a lot bleaker for the writer, the Second World War was ending and all Beckett had had published were
2080-701: A related "Artists' Appeal for Milošević" in 2004. Pinter strongly opposed the 1991 Gulf War , the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in FR Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War , the United States' 2001 War in Afghanistan , and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq . Among his provocative political statements, Pinter called Prime Minister Tony Blair a "deluded idiot" and compared the administration of President George W. Bush to Nazi Germany . He stated that
2210-530: A screenplay for television in 1992, directing that production, first broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 on 17 November 1992. Intertwining political and personal concerns, his next full-length plays, Moonlight (1993) and Ashes to Ashes (1996) are set in domestic households and focus on dying and death; in their personal conversations in Ashes to Ashes , Devlin and Rebecca allude to unspecified atrocities relating to
2340-790: A shaping influence on [Pinter's] politics" and attributed changes in his writing and political views to a change from "an unhappy, complicated personal life ... to a happy, uncomplicated personal life", so that "a side of Harold which had always been there was somehow released. I think you can see that in his work after No Man's Land [1975], which was a very bleak play." Pinter was content in his second marriage and enjoyed family life with his six adult stepchildren and 17 step-grandchildren. Even after battling cancer for several years, he considered himself "a very lucky man in every respect". Sarah Lyall notes in her 2007 interview with Pinter in The New York Times that his "latest work,
2470-493: A slim pamphlet called 'Six Poems for A.', comprises poems written over 32 years, with "A" of course being Lady Antonia. The first of the poems was written in Paris, where she and Mr. Pinter traveled soon after they met. More than three decades later the two are rarely apart, and Mr. Pinter turns soft, even cozy, when he talks about his wife." In that interview Pinter "acknowledged that his plays—full of infidelity, cruelty, inhumanity,
2600-609: A society man in The Servant (1963) and as Mr. Bell in Accident (1967), both directed by Joseph Losey ; and as a bookshop customer in his later film Turtle Diary (1985), starring Michael Gambon , Glenda Jackson , and Ben Kingsley . Pinter's notable film and television roles included the lawyer Saul Abrahams opposite Peter O'Toole in Rogue Male , BBC TV 's 1976 adaptation of Geoffrey Household 's 1939 novel, and
2730-698: A son, Daniel, born in 1958. He left Merchant in 1975 and married author Lady Antonia Fraser in 1980. Pinter's career as a playwright began with a production of The Room in 1957. His second play, The Birthday Party , closed after eight performances but was enthusiastically reviewed by critic Harold Hobson . His early works were described by critics as " comedy of menace ". Later plays such as No Man's Land (1975) and Betrayal (1978) became known as " memory plays ". He appeared as an actor in productions of his own work on radio and film, and directed nearly 50 productions for stage, theatre and screen. Pinter received over 50 awards, prizes and other honours, including
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#17327980174122860-407: A student at Hackney Downs School , a London grammar school, between 1944 and 1948. "Partly through the school and partly through the social life of Hackney Boys' Club ... he formed an almost sacerdotal belief in the power of male friendship. The friends he made in those days – most particularly Henry Woolf , Michael (Mick) Goldstein and Morris (Moishe) Wernick – have always been a vital part of
2990-569: A tape looking back at who he was, assessing who he is and anticipating what might be to come. His is as disparaging of the young man he was in his twenties as he was then of the youth he had been thinking about when he made that earlier tape. He records the death of his mother, an epiphany at the end of a pier and an idyllic moment in a punt . This character is based on Miss Beamish, an eccentric novelist from Connacht whom Beckett had met in Roussillon , while hiding during World War II . "Whether
3120-858: A television play, which was produced as The Basement , both on BBC 2 and also on stage in 1968. From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Pinter wrote a series of plays and sketches that explore complex ambiguities, elegiac mysteries, comic vagaries, and other "quicksand-like" characteristics of memory and which critics sometimes classify as Pinter's " memory plays ". These include Landscape (1968), Silence (1969), Night (1969), Old Times (1971), No Man's Land (1975), The Proust Screenplay (1977), Betrayal (1978), Family Voices (1981), Victoria Station (1982), and A Kind of Alaska (1982). Some of Pinter's later plays, including Party Time (1991), Moonlight (1993), Ashes to Ashes (1996), and Celebration (2000), draw upon some features of his "memory" dramaturgy in their focus on
3250-453: A temporal gradient with greater sparing of items from earlier years." Krapp's gathering of red-berried holly in the dingle could be an example of the "relatively intact remote memory" that preceded Krapp's apparent addiction to alcohol. Krapp is not a textbook case. He is an individual with his own individual symptomology but he is more than a list of symptoms. Bananas contain pectin , a soluble fibre that can help normalise movement through
3380-733: A third man who is blindfolded, gagged and bound in a chair; Pinter directed the British première at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs , where it opened on 9 July 1991, and the production then transferred to Washington, D.C., where it was revived in 1994. Pinter's longer political satire Party Time (1991) premièred at the Almeida Theatre in London, in a double-bill with Mountain Language . Pinter adapted it as
3510-504: A writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993) and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works. Pinter
3640-531: Is almost wound, and the silent tape is both the time it has left to run and the silence into which he must pass." Whereas the younger Krapp talks about the "fire in me" the tired old man who sits listening is simply "burning to be gone." The title of the play seems obvious, that what we have witnessed is the recording of Krapp’s final tape, "yet there is an ambiguity : 'last' can mean 'most recent' as well as 'ultimate'. The speaker in Browning's My Last Duchess
3770-450: Is already planning to marry his next duchess ... Still, one hopes for Krapp's sake that he will be gone before another year is over." The ending in which Krapp re-listens to his younger self discuss his romantic encounter is a scene of masochism reminiscent of Croak in Words and Music , tormenting himself with an image of a woman’s face. Black-and-white imagery features heavily throughout
3900-471: Is important to remember that Krapp has not simply forgotten his past but he has consciously and systematically rejected it as one way of reassuring himself that he has made the right decisions in "his yearly word letting." In the past year Krapp has been re-reading Fontane's Effi Briest , "a page a day, with tears again," he says, "Could have been happy with her, up there on the Baltic...." Existing only on
4030-514: Is in violation of the three seals or prohibitions of Manichaeism for the elect: the seal of the hands, forbidding engagement in a profession, the seal of the breast against sexual desire, and the seal of the mouth, which forbids the drinking of wine ... Beckett [however] seems to have known no more about Manichaeism than is contained in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica , which he possessed. "Krapp’s spool of life
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4160-415: Is such a distinctive name that he must have got tired of being asked, 'Any relation? ' " Michael Billington wrote that Pinter saw Daniel's name change as "a largely pragmatic move on Daniel's part designed to keep the press ... at bay." Fraser told Billington that Daniel "was very nice to me at a time when it would have been only too easy for him to have turned on me ... simply because he had been
4290-630: Is uncertain even whether the play will still be in the bill by the time they appear, though it is probable it will soon be seen elsewhere. Deliberately, I am willing to risk whatever reputation I have as a judge of plays by saying that The Birthday Party is not a Fourth, not even a Second, but a First [as in Class Honours]; and that Pinter, on the evidence of his work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London ... Mr Pinter and The Birthday Party , despite their experiences last week, will be heard of again. Make
4420-613: The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and also had supported the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (1959–1994), participating in British artists' refusal to permit professional productions of their work in South Africa in 1963 and in subsequent related campaigns. In "A Play and Its Politics", a 1985 interview with Nicholas Hern, Pinter described his earlier plays retrospectively from the perspective of
4550-569: The Donald Wolfit Company, at the King's Theatre, Hammersmith , performing eight roles. From 1954 until 1959, Pinter acted under the stage name David Baron. In all, Pinter played over 20 roles under that name. To supplement his income from acting, Pinter worked as a waiter, a postman, a bouncer, and a snow-clearer, meanwhile, according to Mark Batty, "harbouring ambitions as a poet and writer." In October 1989 Pinter recalled: "I
4680-688: The Gate Theatre , Dublin, was held as part of the annual Lincoln Center Festival at Lincoln Center in New York City. Pinter participated both as an actor, as Nicolas in One for the Road , and as a director of a double bill pairing his last play, Celebration , with his first play, The Room . As part of a two-week "Harold Pinter Homage" at the World Leaders Festival of Creative Genius, held from 24 September to 30 October 2001, at
4810-692: The Grand Hotel in Eastbourne , in early January 1978. After the Frasers' divorce had become final in 1977 and the Pinters' in 1980, Pinter married Fraser on 27 November 1980. Because of a two-week delay in Merchant's signing the divorce papers, however, the reception had to precede the actual ceremony, originally scheduled to occur on his 50th birthday. Vivien Merchant died of acute alcoholism in
4940-925: The Hampstead Theatre Club , in London, in 1960. It was then not produced often until the 1980s, and it has been revived more frequently since 2000, including the West End Trafalgar Studios production in 2007. The first production of The Caretaker , at the Arts Theatre Club , in London, in 1960, established Pinter's theatrical reputation. The play transferred to the Duchess Theatre in May 1960 and ran for 444 performances, receiving an Evening Standard Award for best play of 1960. Large radio and television audiences for his one-act play A Night Out , along with
5070-522: The Holocaust . After experiencing the deaths of first his mother (1992) and then his father (1997), again merging the personal and the political, Pinter wrote the poems "Death" (1997) and "The Disappeared" (1998). Pinter's last stage play, Celebration (2000), is a social satire set in an opulent restaurant, which lampoons The Ivy , a fashionable venue in London's West End theatre district, and its patrons who "have just come from performances of either
5200-622: The Lyric Hammersmith in 1984, he played Nicolas in One for the Road and the cab driver in Victoria Station . Among over 35 plays that Pinter directed were Next of Kin (1974), by John Hopkins ; Blithe Spirit (1976), by Noël Coward ; The Innocents (1976), by William Archibald ; Circe and Bravo (1986), by Donald Freed ; Taking Sides (1995), by Ronald Harwood ; and Twelve Angry Men (1996), by Reginald Rose . Pinter
5330-809: The Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 and the French Légion d'honneur in 2007. Despite frail health after being diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in December 2001, Pinter continued to act on stage and screen, last performing the title role of Samuel Beckett 's one-act monologue Krapp's Last Tape , for the 50th anniversary season of the Royal Court Theatre , in October 2006. He died from liver cancer on 24 December 2008. Pinter
Richard Imison Award - Misplaced Pages Continue
5460-762: The Pulitzer Prize -winning play Wit (2001); and the Director opposite John Gielgud (Gielgud's last role) and Rebecca Pidgeon in Catastrophe , by Samuel Beckett , directed by David Mamet as part of Beckett on Film (2001). Pinter began to direct more frequently during the 1970s, becoming an associate director of the National Theatre (NT) in 1973. He directed almost 50 productions of his own and others' plays for stage, film, and television, including 10 productions of works by Simon Gray :
5590-595: The Royal National Theatre , and a revival of The Caretaker directed by Patrick Marber and starring Michael Gambon , Rupert Graves , and Douglas Hodge , at the Comedy Theatre . Like Celebration , Pinter's penultimate sketch, Press Conference (2002), "invokes both torture and the fragile, circumscribed existence of dissent". In its première in the National Theatre 's two-part production of Sketches , despite undergoing chemotherapy at
5720-486: The digestive tract and ease constipation. Bananas can also aggravate constipation especially in young children. It depends what the root cause of the problem is. They are also high in Vitamins A and C as well as niacin , riboflavin and thiamine and one of the root causes of Korsakoff's Syndrome is thiamine deficiency; eating bananas would be good for him. It is easy to get caught up in this kind of over-analysis to
5850-546: The invasion of Iraq ? A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism , demonstrating absolute contempt for the conception of international law ." Pinter earned a reputation for being pugnacious, enigmatic, taciturn, terse, prickly, explosive and forbidding. Pinter's blunt political statements, and the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, elicited strong criticism and even, at times, provoked ridicule and personal attacks. The historian Geoffrey Alderman , author of
5980-469: The "little emerald ". Although the relationship is often cited as being a little one-sided, Beckett does recall: "Oh, Peggy didn’t need any chasing." This character does the majority of the talking throughout the play. His voice is contained on Tape 5 from Box 3. His voice is strong and rather pompous. He has celebrated his birthday alone in an empty wine house before returning home to consume three bananas. As has become his practice on his birthday he makes
6110-543: The 1966 film Alfie . Their son Daniel was born in 1958. Through the early 1970s, Merchant appeared in many of Pinter's works, including The Homecoming on stage (1965) and screen (1973), but the marriage was turbulent. For seven years, from 1962 to 1969, Pinter was engaged in a clandestine affair with BBC-TV presenter and journalist Joan Bakewell , which inspired his 1978 play Betrayal , and also throughout that period and beyond he had an affair with an American socialite, whom he nicknamed "Cleopatra". This relationship
6240-483: The 1984 film Swann in Love ( Un amour de Swann ), directed by Volker Schlöndorff , and it was also adapted by Michael Bakewell as a two-hour radio drama broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1995, before Pinter and director Di Trevis collaborated to adapt it for the 2000 National Theatre production. Pinter's last filmed screenplay was an adaptation of the 1970 Tony Award -winning play Sleuth , by Anthony Shaffer , which
6370-524: The Blitz. In 1971, he told Mel Gussow : "one of my main obsessions in life is the game of cricket—I play and watch and read about it all the time." He was chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club, a supporter of Yorkshire Cricket Club , and devoted a section of his official website to the sport. One wall of his study was dominated by a portrait of himself as a young man playing cricket, which
6500-510: The Day (1990), and Lolita (1997), remain unpublished and in the case of the latter two films, uncredited, though several scenes from or aspects of his scripts were used in these finished films. His screenplays The Proust Screenplay (1972), Victory (1982), and The Dreaming Child (1997) and his unpublished screenplay The Tragedy of King Lear (2000) have not been filmed. A section of Pinter's Proust Screenplay was, however, released as
6630-545: The English language as an adjective, " Pinteresque ", although Pinter himself disliked the term and found it meaningless. Pinter's first play, The Room , written and first performed in 1957, was a student production at the University of Bristol , directed by his good friend, actor Henry Woolf , who also originated the role of Mr. Kidd (which he reprised in 2001 and 2007). After Pinter mentioned that he had an idea for
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#17327980174126760-654: The Harbourfront Centre, in Toronto, Canada, Pinter presented a dramatic reading of Celebration (2000) and also participated in a public interview as part of the International Festival of Authors . Krapp%27s Last Tape#Harold Pinter Krapp's Last Tape is a 1958 one-act play , in English, by Samuel Beckett . With a cast of one man, it was written for Northern Irish actor Patrick Magee and first titled "Magee monologue ". It
6890-546: The Lobster '. Kedar Street is not a real location but an anagram of 'darke' or Hebrew for 'black'. Keeping this in mind, the name may simply have been selected because " bianca " means "white woman" in Italian. Little is recorded about her other than "'a tribute to her eyes. Very warm.'" Vivian Mercier , who knew Beckett personally, writes: "Although I do not recall his ever using the phrase, Beckett unquestionably regards
7020-538: The Merrion Nursing Home which overlooked Dublin’s Grand Canal . Beckett had made the trip over in the early summer to be with her. By 24 July medical opinion confirmed that she was dying. During that last long month he used "to walk disconsolately alone along the towpath of the Grand Canal." Towards the end she was oblivious to his presence. Her death took place while he was sitting on a bench by
7150-618: The Nobel Prize. Later Pinter continued to campaign against the Iraq War and on behalf of other political causes that he supported. Pinter signed the mission statement of Jews for Justice for Palestinians in 2005 and its full-page advertisement, "What Is Israel Doing? A Call by Jews in Britain", published in The Times on 6 July 2006, and he was a patron of the Palestine Festival of Literature . In April 2008, Pinter signed
7280-724: The Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language inspired his 1988 play Mountain Language . He was also an active member of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign , an organisation that "campaigns in the UK against the US blockade of Cuba ". In 2001, Pinter joined the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević (ICDSM), which appealed for a fair trial and for the freedom of Slobodan Milošević , signing
7410-776: The United States "was charging towards world domination while the American public and Britain's ' mass-murdering ' prime minister sat back and watched." He was very active in the antiwar movement in the United Kingdom, speaking at rallies held by the Stop the War Coalition and frequently criticising American aggression, as when he asked rhetorically, in his acceptance speech for the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry on 18 March 2007: "What would Wilfred Owen make of
7540-458: The age of 12, Pinter began writing poetry, and in spring 1947, his poetry was first published in the Hackney Downs School Magazine . In 1950 his poetry was first published outside the school magazine, in Poetry London , some of it under the pseudonym "Harold Pinta". Pinter was an atheist. Pinter enjoyed running and broke the Hackney Downs School sprinting record. He was a cricket enthusiast, taking his bat with him when evacuated during
7670-405: The apparent "invulnerability of power." Just before this hiatus, in 1979, Pinter re-discovered his manuscript of The Hothouse , which he had written in 1958 but had set aside; he revised it and then directed its first production himself at Hampstead Theatre in London, in 1980. Like his plays of the 1980s, The Hothouse concerns authoritarianism and the abuses of power politics, but it is also
7800-418: The ball is black to contrast with the white of the dog. In All Strange Away a "small grey punctured rubber ball" is the last object contemplated before Fancy dies. The ball had already appeared in All That Fall : Jerry returns "a kind of ball" to Mr. Rooney. Although not an obvious symbol of death, this ball is a significant motif of childhood grief for Beckett though none of his biographers propose that
7930-401: The ballet or the opera. Not that they can remember a darn thing about what they saw, including the titles. [These] gilded, foul-mouthed souls are just as myopic when it comes to their own table mates (and for that matter, their food), with conversations that usually connect only on the surface, if there." On its surface the play may appear to have fewer overtly political resonances than some of
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#17327980174128060-418: The canal. "At a certain point he happened to look up. The blinds of his mother’s window, a dirty red-brown affair, was down. She was dead." A drawn blind, an old custom signifying death, also makes an appearance in Rockaby : "let down the blind and down". When Krapp’s mother died, he was throwing a ball for a little white dog. He says he will keep it forever: "But I gave it away to the dog." Significantly
8190-479: The detriment of the play as a whole. "[A]ttempts to demonstrate that Beckett's characters conform to specific psychological syndromes so often turn into will-o-the-wisp pursuits. Certainly, Beckett would not deny that psychologists have offered very useful descriptions of mental activity. But their theories are typically no more than initial steps in an understanding of mental processes, fragmented bits of knowledge which should not be taken for universal principles." It
8320-427: The earlier drafts the woman with whom the young Krapp lived [later named "Bianca"] was first named 'Alba' (a character in Dream of Fair to Middling Women modelled on Ethna MacCarthy whom he had loved when he was a young man), then 'Celia' (the name of the green-eyed prostitute with whom Murphy cohabits in Murphy ), then 'Furry' (nickname of Anne Rudmose-Brown, the wife of Beckett's French Professor at Trinity , who
8450-458: The emotional texture of his life." A major influence on Pinter was his inspirational English teacher Joseph Brearley, who directed him in school plays and with whom he took long walks, talking about literature. According to Billington, under Brearley's instruction, "Pinter shone at English, wrote for the school magazine and discovered a gift for acting." In 1947 and 1948, he played Romeo and Macbeth in productions directed by Brearley. At
8580-499: The end of the tape to escape the onslaught of words, where suddenly the mood has changed and he finds himself in the middle of a description of a romantic liaison between himself and a woman in a punt . Krapp lets it play out and then rewinds the tape to hear the complete episode. Afterwards, Krapp loads a fresh tape and begins to recount his year. He is scathing when it comes to his assessment of his thirty-nine-year-old self. He finds he has nothing he wants to record for posterity, save
8710-575: The eyes as the windows of the soul." Krapp’s father, the only other man mentioned in the play, is spoken of only very briefly. The expression "Last illness" suggests he has not been a well man for some time and dies while Krapp is in his twenties. His own father, William Beckett, died of a heart attack in June 1933, when Beckett was twenty-seven. Beckett's first love, his cousin, Peggy Sinclair , had "deep green eyes and [had a] passionate love of green clothing." An allusion to Peggy Sinclair also appears in Dream of Fair to Middling Women in Smeraldina,
8840-462: The fact he "revelled in the word spool ." He mentions a trip to the park and attending Vespers , where he dozed off and fell off the pew. He also mentions his recent literary disappointments: "seventeen copies sold", presumably of his last book, eleven of which have gone not to interested readers but to foreign libraries. His sex life has been reduced to periodic visits by an old prostitute. Unlike his younger selves, Krapp has nothing good to say about
8970-552: The first week of October 1982, at the age of 53. Billington writes that Pinter "did everything possible to support" her and regretted that he ultimately became estranged from their son, Daniel, after their separation, Pinter's remarriage, and Merchant's death. A reclusive gifted musician and writer, Daniel changed his surname from Pinter to Brand, the maiden name of his maternal grandmother, before Pinter and Fraser became romantically involved; while according to Fraser, his father could not understand it, she says that she could: "Pinter
9100-475: The fool he was but only time will reveal what kind of fool he has become. Although no time frame is given, it is likely that sixty-nine-year-old Krapp's memories of being "again in the dingle at Christmas Eve, gathering holly ... [or] on Croghan on a Sunday morning, in the haze, with the bitch" alludes to Beckett's own childhood familial memories. His birth-sign in early drafts is given as Aries , Beckett's own. All we learn about Krapp at this age comes from
9230-462: The gratification of those very bodily appetites that, earlier, he had resolved should be out of his life. Eating bananas and drinking have become a [daily routine]. Of the physical activities that he once considered excesses only sex has come to play a reduced part in his lonely existence" in the form of periodic visits from an old prostitute. Although this is a play about memory, the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp himself remembers very little. Virtually all
9360-469: The influence of Samuel Beckett , particularly on his early work; they became friends, sending each other drafts of their works in progress for comments. Pinter wrote The Hothouse in 1958, which he shelved for over 20 years (See "Overtly political plays and sketches" below). Next he wrote The Dumb Waiter (1959), which premièred in Germany and was then produced in a double bill with The Room at
9490-529: The later ones present literal realities of power and its abuse. Pinter's "political theatre dramatizes the interplay and conflict of the opposing poles of involvement and disengagement." Mountain Language (1988) is about the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language . The dramatic sketch The New World Order (1991) provides what Robert Cushman, writing in The Independent described as "10 nerve-wracking minutes" of two men threatening to torture
9620-430: The lot—seem at odds with his domestic contentment. 'How can you write a happy play?' he said. 'Drama is about conflict and degrees of perturbation, disarray. I've never been able to write a happy play, but I've been able to enjoy a happy life. ' " After his death, Fraser told The Guardian : "He was a great man, and it was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years. He will never be forgotten." In 1948–49, when he
9750-404: The man he has become and even the idea of making a "last effort" when it comes to his writing upsets him. He retreats into memories from his dim and distant past, gathering holly and walking the dog of a Sunday morning. He then remembers the girl on the punt and wrenches off the tape he has been recording, swapping back to the prior tape and replaying the entire section again. This time he allows
9880-533: The mid-1950s Beckett was already talking and working like a director. In a letter to Rosset's editorial assistant, Judith Schmidt, on 11 May 1959, Beckett referred to the staging of Krapp's Last Tape as its 'creation'," and he made numerous significant changes to the text over the years as he was involved in directing the play. The first German performance, on 28 September 1959, was directed by Walter Henn at Berlin's Schillertheater , where 10 years later, on 5 October 1969, Samuel Beckett himself staged his text in
10010-502: The most crucial of all Pinter's lost Edens ." Beginning in late 1948, Pinter attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for two terms, but hating the school, missed most of his classes, feigned a nervous breakdown, and dropped out in 1949. In 1948 he was called up for National Service . He was initially refused registration as a conscientious objector , leading to his twice being prosecuted, and fined, for refusing to accept
10140-529: The mystery of life and I'm still in the middle of it. I can't find the door to get out. My grandfather got out of it. He got right out of it. He left it behind him and he didn't look back. He got that absolutely right. And I'd like to make one further interjection. He stands still. Slow fade . During 2000–2001, there were also simultaneous productions of Remembrance of Things Past , Pinter's stage adaptation of his unpublished Proust Screenplay , written in collaboration with and directed by Di Trevis , at
10270-533: The noisy, bustling, traffic-ridden thoroughfare of the Lower Clapton Road". In 1940 and 1941, after the Blitz , Pinter was evacuated from their house in London to Cornwall and Reading . Billington states that the "life-and-death intensity of daily experience" before and during the Blitz left Pinter with profound memories "of loneliness, bewilderment, separation and loss: themes that are in all his works." Pinter discovered his social potential as
10400-477: The notion of male loyalty, competitive rivalry and fear of betrayal forms a constant thread in Pinter's work from The Dwarfs onwards, its origins can be found in his teenage Hackney years. Pinter adores women, enjoys flirting with them, and worships their resilience and strength. But, in his early work especially, they are often seen as disruptive influences on some pure and Platonic ideal of male friendship: one of
10530-500: The novel by Penelope Mortimer , directed by Jack Clayton ; The Quiller Memorandum (1966), from the 1965 spy novel The Berlin Memorandum , by Elleston Trevor , directed by Michael Anderson ; The Last Tycoon (1976), from the unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald , directed by Elia Kazan ; The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), from the novel by John Fowles , directed by Karel Reisz ; Turtle Diary (1985), based on
10660-666: The novel by Robin Maugham ; Accident (1967), adapted from the novel by Nicholas Mosley ; and The Go-Between (1971), based on the novel by L. P. Hartley . Films based on Pinter's adaptations of his own stage plays are: The Caretaker (1963), directed by Clive Donner ; The Birthday Party (1968), directed by William Friedkin ; The Homecoming (1973), directed by Peter Hall; and Betrayal (1983), directed by David Jones . Pinter also adapted other writers' novels to screenplays, including The Pumpkin Eater (1964), based on
10790-414: The novel by Russell Hoban ; The Heat of the Day (1988), a television film, from the 1949 novel by Elizabeth Bowen ; The Comfort of Strangers (1990), from the novel by Ian McEwan , directed by Paul Schrader ; and The Trial (1993), from the novel by Franz Kafka , directed by David Jones. His commissioned screenplays of others' works for the films The Handmaid's Tale (1990), The Remains of
10920-515: The official history of Hackney Downs School, expressed his own "Jewish View" of Harold Pinter: "Whatever his merit as a writer, actor and director, on an ethical plane Harold Pinter seems to me to have been intensely flawed, and his moral compass deeply fractured." David Edgar , writing in The Guardian , defended Pinter against what he termed Pinter's "being berated by the belligerati" like Johann Hari , who felt that he did not "deserve" to win
11050-440: The past in the present, but they have personal and political resonances and other tonal differences from these earlier memory plays. Following a three-year period of creative drought in the early 1980s after his marriage to Antonia Fraser and the death of Vivien Merchant, Pinter's plays tended to become shorter and more overtly political, serving as critiques of oppression , torture , and other abuses of human rights, linked by
11180-528: The play garnered four Tony Awards , among other awards. During this period, Pinter also wrote the radio play A Slight Ache , first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in 1959 and then adapted to the stage and performed at the Arts Theatre Club in 1961. A Night Out (1960) was broadcast to a large audience on ABC Weekend TV 's television show Armchair Theatre , after being transmitted on BBC Radio 3, also in 1960. His play Night School
11310-399: The play in 1970, that the girl was modelled on Ethna. On 11 December 1957 Beckett learned that Ethna was terminally ill and regularly wrote uncharacteristically long letters until her death. When he completed the play he wrote her: "I’ve written in English a stage monologue for Pat Magee which I think you will like if no one else." At one point in the recollection, the young Krapp leans over
11440-567: The play indicates Pinter's pessimism about the possibility of changing the status quo. Yet, as the Waiter's often comically unbelievable reminiscences about his grandfather demonstrate in Celebration , Pinter's final stage plays also extend some expressionistic aspects of his earlier "memory plays", while harking back to his "comedies of menace", as illustrated in the characters and in the Waiter's final speech: My grandfather introduced me to
11570-473: The play. Although there is only one person onstage, there are a number of 'characters' mentioned throughout. The play is considered to be Beckett at his most autobiographical, and it does draw heavily on biographical detail. He once told the scholar Lawrence Harvey, though, that his "work does not depend on experience – [it is] not a record of experience. Of course you use it." Beckett takes elements from his own life, his failed love life, his drinking, his – at
11700-738: The plays from the 1980s and 1990s; but its central male characters, brothers named Lambert and Matt, are members of the elite (like the men in charge in Party Time ), who describe themselves as "peaceful strategy consultants [because] we don't carry guns." At the next table, Russell, a banker, describes himself as a "totally disordered personality ... a psychopath", while Lambert "vows to be reincarnated as '[a] more civilised, [a] gentler person, [a] nicer person'." These characters' deceptively smooth exteriors mask their extreme viciousness. Celebration evokes familiar Pinteresque political contexts: "The ritzy loudmouths in 'Celebration' ... and
11830-665: The politics of power and the dynamics of oppression. In his last 25 years, Pinter increasingly focused his essays, interviews and public appearances directly on political issues. He was an officer in International PEN , travelling with American playwright Arthur Miller to Turkey in 1985 on a mission co-sponsored with a Helsinki Watch committee to investigate and protest against the torture of imprisoned writers. There he met victims of political oppression and their families. Pinter's experiences in Turkey and his knowledge of
11960-484: The popularity of his revue sketches, propelled him to further critical attention. In 1964, The Birthday Party was revived both on television (with Pinter himself in the role of Goldberg) and on stage (directed by Pinter at the Aldwych Theatre ) and was well received. By the time Peter Hall's London production of The Homecoming (1964) reached Broadway in 1967, Pinter had become a celebrity playwright, and
12090-455: The presence of the dog is anything more than artistic license. Beckett makes the relationship of this woman to Krapp clear when "[i]n 1975, directing Pierre Chabert in Paris, Beckett said: 'I thought of writing a play on the opposite situation, with Mrs Krapp, the girl in the punt , nagging away behind him, in which case his failure and his solitude would be exactly the same.'" In her biography of Beckett, Deirdre Bair deduces that "the girl in
12220-469: The printed page this fantasy woman is perhaps the most black-and-white of all Krapp’s women. Like the girl in the punt and the nursemaid mentioned earlier, perhaps to contrast with his inner fire, "Once again Beckett situates Krapp's memory on some side near the water." Just as Krapp’s name is a vulgar pun , so is the name Beckett gave to the woman who visits him from time to time, whom he describes as
12350-528: The production of Drama for this genre. After his death in 1993 the Society of Authors established the Imison Award in recognition of Imison's enduring influence on the development of high quality dramatic writing. Submissions for the award must consist of a completed nomination form as well as three copies of the writer's original script and recording of the broadcast. Further copies may be requested if
12480-507: The protagonist is Victor Krap, a young man who has decided to retreat from life and do nothing. He has been described as a world-weary anti-hero , a failed writer and seedy solipsist , a clear prototype for the later Krapp. When the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp is talking about his neighbour's ritual singing in the evening he tries to remember if he sang as a boy and is unable to do so. He does recall attending Vespers but it would be unusual for him to attend Evensong without participating in
12610-437: The pseudonym Pinta and at other times used variations such as da Pinto . Later research by Lady Antonia Fraser , Pinter's second wife, revealed the legend to be apocryphal; three of Pinter's grandparents came from Poland and the fourth from Odesa , so the family was Ashkenazic . Pinter's family home in London is described by his official biographer Michael Billington as "a solid, red-brick, three-storey villa just off
12740-764: The punt" may be Peggy Sinclair because of the references to "Effi" and to "the Baltic ": in July 1929 Beckett vacationed with the Sinclairs "in one of the smaller resort towns along the Baltic Sea . Summer, traditionally the time for light reading, found Peggy tearfully engrossed in Theodor Fontane 's novel, Effi Briest . Beckett read it too, but with more detachment than Peggy, who wept and suffered as Effi's infidelity ended her marriage." Talking to James Knowlson,
12870-451: The quieter working-class mumblers of 'The Room' ... have everything in common beneath the surface". "Money remains in the service of entrenched power, and the brothers in the play are 'strategy consultants' whose jobs involve force and violence ... It is tempting but inaccurate to equate the comic power inversions of the social behaviour in Celebration with lasting change in larger political structures", according to Grimes, for whom
13000-647: The real Miss Beamish did actually sing regularly every evening is ... debatable. Beckett did not remember this." There appears to be no direct correlation between this character and anyone living. The black-and-white imagery is strong here: her white uniform and the "big black hooded perambulator ." Krapp also remembers this woman’s eyes as being "[l]ike ... chrysolite !" Rosemary Pountney observes Beckett changed " moonstone " to chrysolite, an olive-green coloured mineral, in Typescript 4. She observes also that Beckett made "a direct connection ... with Othello ,
13130-823: The recollections come from the tape. As evidenced most clearly in the novel Murphy , Beckett had a decent understanding of a variety of mental illnesses including Korsakoff's Alcoholic Syndrome ––"A hypomaniac teaching slosh to a Korsakow's syndrome." ––which is characterised by powerful amnesic symptoms accompanied by intestinal obstruction . In his focus on chronic alcohol consumption , Narinder Kapur explains in Memory Disorders in Clinical Practice that it can lead to marked memory loss and generalised cognitive defects, as well as "disorientation for time and also place". More recent memories are likely to be forgotten than remote memories, for "memory loss shows
13260-436: The recorded Krapp, before describing how much he enjoys leaving it to wander off into the darkness so that he may return to the zone of light, identifying it with his essential self. The voice reports that he has just reviewed an old tape from when he was in his late twenties. It amuses him to comment on his impressions of what he was like in his twenties, and the 69-year-old Krapp joins in the derisory laughter. The young man he
13390-669: The relationship from Merchant for two and a half months, on 21 March 1975, Pinter finally told her "I've met somebody". After that, "Life in Hanover Terrace gradually became impossible", and Pinter moved out of their house on 28 April 1975, five days after the première of No Man's Land . In mid-August 1977, after Pinter and Fraser had spent two years living in borrowed and rented quarters, they moved into her former family home in Holland Park , where Pinter began writing Betrayal . He reworked it later, while on holiday at
13520-425: The singing of the hymn. The sixty-nine-year-old Krapp sings a few lines from the "Now the Day is Over" in early performances of the play but Beckett excised this as being "too clumsily explicit". The 39-year-old Krapp looks back on the 20-odd-year-old Krapp with the same level of contempt as the 20-odd-year-old Krapp appears to have displayed for the young man he saw himself for in his late teens. Each can see clearly
13650-630: The sole focus of his father's love and now manifestly wasn't." Still unreconciled at the time of his father's death, Daniel Brand did not attend Pinter's funeral. Billington observes that "The break-up with Vivien and the new life with Antonia was to have a profound effect on Pinter's personality and his work," though he adds that Fraser herself did not claim to have influence over Pinter or his writing. In her own contemporaneous diary entry dated 15 January 1993, Fraser described herself more as Pinter's literary midwife. Indeed, she told Billington that "other people [such as Peggy Ashcroft , among others] had
13780-562: The stage and/or film premières of Butley (stage, 1971; film, 1974), Otherwise Engaged (1975), The Rear Column (stage, 1978; TV, 1980), Close of Play (NT, 1979), Quartermaine's Terms (1981), Life Support (1997), The Late Middle Classes (1999), and The Old Masters (2004). Several of those productions starred Alan Bates (1934–2003), who originated the stage and screen roles of not only Butley but also Mick in Pinter's first major commercial success, The Caretaker (stage, 1960; film, 1964); and in Pinter's double-bill produced at
13910-684: The statement "We're not celebrating Israel's anniversary". The statement noted: "We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land.", "We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East" Pinter's acting career spanned over 50 years and, although he often played villains , included a wide range of roles on stage and in radio, film, and television. In addition to roles in radio and television adaptations of his own plays and dramatic sketches, early in his screenwriting career he made several cameo appearances in films based on his own screenplays; for example, as
14040-422: The tape to play to the very end, with the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp determinedly not regretting the choices he has made, certain that what he would produce in the years to come would more than compensate him for any potential loss of happiness. Krapp makes no response to this but allows the tape to play on, silent, until the final curtain. In Waiting for Godot , Beckett uses aspects of Judeo-Christianity as
14170-413: The tape. Like a lot of young men he is full of "aspirations" – his work is starting to take shape – and "resolutions" – he is already aware that his drinking needs to be curbed. He is becoming resigned to the fact that he might well have let true love – represented by the image of a "girl in a shabby green coat, on a railway-station platform" – get away from him. He has settled for an on/off relationship with
14300-518: The template for his play, in Film the template is the writings of Bishop Berkeley , and in Krapp's Last Tape , according to Anthony Cronin , he uses Manichaeism as a structural device: The dichotomy of light and dark ... is central to Manichaean doctrine ... Its adherents believed that the world was ruled by evil powers, against which the god of the whole of creation struggled as yet in vain ... Krapp
14430-604: The time – literary failures and looks where things might have gone. "When, in 1956, Vivian Mercier saw him in Paris, he told him that he felt 'all dried up, with nothing left but self-translation.'" Krapp was originally designated simply ‘A’ in the first draft. The first appearance of a title was "a manuscript edition to Typescript 2: Crapp’s Last Tape "; the more familiar Germanic spelling came later. The name Krapp with its excremental connotations had been used before by Beckett however. In his first play, Eleutheria (unstaged and unpublished during his life), dating back to 1947,
14560-418: The time, Pinter played the ruthless Minister willing to murder little children for the benefit of "The State". Pinter composed 27 screenplays and film scripts for cinema and television, many of which were filmed, or adapted as stage plays. His fame as a screenwriter began with his three screenplays written for films directed by Joseph Losey , leading to their close friendship: The Servant (1963), based on
14690-404: The word in a large dictionary. He returns to the tape; at the moment he learns of his mother's death, his younger self is in the process of throwing a rubber ball to a dog. He ends up simply leaving the ball with the dog. The voice starts to describe the revelation he experienced at the end of a pier. Krapp grows impatient when his younger self starts enthusing about this. He fast-forwards to near
14820-455: The work is short-listed. Further details can be found on the Society of Authors website. The prize winners Harold Pinter Harold Pinter CH CBE ( / ˈ p ɪ n t ər / ; 10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with
14950-473: The young woman to shade her from the sun. "Let me in," he says. This caused the Lord Chamberlain some concerns when the play was first presented before him to grant a license . He believed that what was being suggested was a desire for sexual penetration and was not convinced that Beckett was simply alluding to her eyes. It was not until a mere three weeks before the play's opening that the objection
15080-720: Was 18, Pinter opposed the politics of the Cold War , leading to his decision to become a conscientious objector and to refuse to comply with National Service in the British military. However, he told interviewers that, if he had been old enough at the time, he would have fought against the Nazis in World War II . He seemed to express ambivalence, both indifference and hostility, towards political structures and politicians in his Fall 1966 Paris Review interview conducted by Lawrence M. Bensky . Yet, he had been an early member of
15210-552: Was another secret he kept from both his wife and Bakewell. Initially, Betrayal was thought to be a response to his later affair with historian Antonia Fraser , the wife of Hugh Fraser , and Pinter's "marital crack-up". Pinter and Merchant had both met Antonia Fraser in 1969, when all three worked together on a National Gallery programme about Mary, Queen of Scots ; several years later, on 8–9 January 1975, Pinter and Fraser became romantically involved. That meeting initiated their five-year extramarital love affair. After hiding
15340-430: Was back then is described as idealistic and unrealistic in his expectations. The voice reviews his last year, talking about sitting on a bench outside the nursing home and waiting for the news that his mother had died. Krapp in the current day is more interested in his younger self's use of the rather archaic word "viduity" than the reaction of the voice on the tape to their mother's passing. He stops listening to look up
15470-631: Was born and raised in Hackney , east London, and educated at Hackney Downs School . He was a sprinter and a keen cricket player, acting in school plays and writing poetry . He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but did not complete the course. He was fined for refusing national service as a conscientious objector . Subsequently, he continued training at the Central School of Speech and Drama and worked in repertory theatre in Ireland and England. In 1956 he married actress Vivien Merchant and had
15600-476: Was born on 10 October 1930, in Hackney , east London, the only child of British Jewish parents of Eastern European descent: his father, Hyman "Jack" Pinter (1902–1997) was a ladies' tailor; his mother, Frances (née Moskowitz; 1904–1992), a housewife. Pinter believed an aunt's erroneous view that the family was Sephardic and had fled the Spanish Inquisition ; thus, for his early poems, Pinter used
15730-408: Was commissioned by Jude Law , one of the film's producers. It is the basis for the 2007 film Sleuth , directed by Kenneth Branagh . Pinter's screenplays for The French Lieutenant's Woman and Betrayal were nominated for Academy Awards in 1981 and 1983, respectively. From 16 to 31 July 2001, a Harold Pinter Festival celebrating his work, curated by Michael Colgan , artistic director of
15860-705: Was composed on the machine from a tangle of old notes, so I have not the MS to offer you." According to Ackerley and Gontarski, "It was first published in Evergreen Review 2.5 (summer 1958), then in Krapp's Last Tape and Embers (Faber, 1959), and Krapp's Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces (Grove, 1960)." Beckett’s own translation of the play into French, La Dernière Bande , was published in Les Lettres Nouvelles on 4 March 1959. The available printed texts must not be taken as definitive. "By
15990-635: Was described by Sarah Lyall , writing in The New York Times : "The painted Mr. Pinter, poised to swing his bat, has a wicked glint in his eye; testosterone all but flies off the canvas." Pinter approved of the "urban and exacting idea of cricket as a bold theatre of aggression." After his death, several of his school contemporaries recalled his achievements in sports, especially cricket and running. The BBC Radio 4 memorial tribute included an essay on Pinter and cricket. Other interests that Pinter mentioned to interviewers are family, love and sex, drinking, writing, and reading. According to Billington, "If
16120-490: Was dropped. In 1982 Beckett, in response to a similar suggestion from one of James Knowlson's postgraduate students , "said with a chuckle, 'Tell her to read her texts more carefully. She'll see that Krapp would need to have a penis at an angle of a hundred and eighty degrees to make coitus possible in the position he is in!'" ––a position that Rosette Lamont proposes also "suggests that of a suckling babe ." Beckett would not be 69 until 1975 so, from his perspective, with Krapp
16250-494: Was first televised in 1960 on Associated Rediffusion . The Collection premièred at the Aldwych Theatre in 1962, and The Dwarfs , adapted from Pinter's then unpublished novel of the same title, was first broadcast on radio in 1960, then adapted for the stage (also at the Arts Theatre Club) in a double bill with The Lover , which had previously been televised by Associated Rediffusion in 1963; and Tea Party ,
16380-527: Was himself satirised as 'the Polar Bear' in Dream of Fair to Middling Women ).". He settled on 'Bianca', who was most likely based on another lecturer, Bianca Esposito, who (along with Walter Starkie ) taught him Italian and cultivated his lifelong passion for Dante . He took private lessons from Signorina Esposito as well. Those lessons at 21 Ely Place were then caricatured in the short story ' Dante and
16510-446: Was in English rep as an actor for about 12 years. My favourite roles were undoubtedly the sinister ones. They're something to get your teeth into." During that period, he also performed occasional roles in his own and others' works for radio, TV, and film, as he continued to do throughout his career. From 1956 until 1980, Pinter was married to Vivien Merchant , an actress whom he met on tour, perhaps best known for her performance in
16640-479: Was initially both a commercial and critical disaster, despite an enthusiastic review in The Sunday Times by its influential drama critic Harold Hobson , which appeared only after the production had closed and could not be reprieved. Critical accounts often quote Hobson: I am well aware that Mr Pinter[']s play received extremely bad notices last Tuesday morning. At the moment I write these [words] it
16770-527: Was inspired by Beckett's experience of listening to Magee reading extracts from Molloy and From an Abandoned Work on the BBC Third Programme in December 1957. It is considered to be among Beckett’s major dramas. In a letter to a London bookseller Jake Schwartz on 15 March 1958, Beckett wrote that he had "'four states, in typescript, with copious notes and dirty corrections, of a short stage monologue I have just written (in English) for Pat Magee. This
16900-426: Was the author of 29 plays and 15 dramatic sketches and the co-author of two works for stage and radio. He was considered to have been one of the most influential modern British dramatists, Along with the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play for The Homecoming and several other American awards and award nominations, he and his plays received many awards in the UK and elsewhere throughout the world. His style has entered
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