12 - Pinter and Ireland

Summary

During the 1990s and 2000s Dublin's Gate Theatre, under the artistic direction of Michael Colgan, staged a series of festivals celebrating the achievement of two of the century's greatest playwrights, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Both involved productions of individual plays performed by Irish practitioners or by foreign artists long associated with the playwright, backed up by seminars and debates. But there were differences. One playwright, Beckett, was recently dead when the Festival of his dramatic works was first staged in 1991; the other, Pinter, was alive and present throughout all three of his, directing on two occasions, acting on one. It is possible to stage all of Beckett's plays on the one occasion, as was done in 1991; whereas even with a Pinter Festival in 1994, another in 1997 and a third on the playwright's seventy-fifth birthday in 2005 there still remain key works unperformed and an element of choice colours each occasion. But a third factor relates to Ireland and the decision to stage a festival of a dramatist's work. The staging of all of Beckett's plays in Dublin by a predominantly Irish theatrical group was an important step in the establishment of Beckett as an Irish (as opposed to an English, French, international or non-specific) playwright; the adoption of Irish accents by Ben Kingsley and Alan Howard in Peter Hall's revisiting of Waiting for Godot in 1997 may be taken as confirmation of the extent to which Beckett's Irishness is now universally conceded. The same was even more the case in 2006, the centenary of Beckett's birth. But Pinter is English and cannot even claim the Irish ancestors that might have got his plays produced at the Abbey Theatre.