11 - Pinter and Ireland

Summary

During the 1990s Dublin's Gate Theatre, under the artistic direction of Michael Colgan, staged 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 was first staged in 1991; the other, Pinter, was alive and present throughout, directing on two occasions, acting on one. It is possible to stage all of Beckett's plays on the one occasion; whereas even with a Pinter Festival in 1994 and another in 1997 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 a key 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. But Pinter is English and cannot even claim the Irish ancestors that might have got his plays produced at the Abbey Theatre. Michael Colgan rightly argued that he regarded Pinter as one of the greatest living playwrights and one he wished to honour, by mounting productions of plays of classic status that had rarely received professional Irish productions. But there also has always been, as Colgan would have known, an Irish strand to Pinter’s career to which the Pinter Festivals at the Gate would contribute. There are two aspects to this relationship I wish to consider in this chapter: first, Pinter’s career as an actor in Ireland in the early 1950s with the troupe of Anew McMaster; and second, the impact on his theatrical practice of such Irish playwrights as Beckett and Yeats, and the early Abbey Theatre.