Hackney Empire’s tribute to Harold Pinter

In June 2008, the Hackney Empire launched the Harold Pinter writer’s residency and opened the Harold Pinter room in tribute to the Nobel laureate who was born and brought up in the borough. Jan Woolf, the first writer in residence, reflects on Pinter’s influence.

I met Harold Pinter several times as one of the many activists and artists working with him during the decade spanning the two Gulf wars. I’ll never forget his reading at the ‘Naming of the Dead’ in Trafalgar Square, a commemorative event organised the night before Bush’s re-election. He read each Iraqi name as if it were a carefully chosen word for a poem, each name heavy with the significance, individuality and importance of that life. A quality carried in his art.

The nearest I can come to a personal anecdote about Harold Pinter comes from the ‘London Says Not in Our Name’ performances at City Hall, just before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Reading his poem American Football with an angry clarity, he projected his voice from his heart and guts, right into, I felt, 10 Downing Street. It was electric.

Towards the end of the evening he asked me to call a taxi, and show him the way out of this rather complex building. (You probably know that City Hall is designed as a spiral, like an elegant snail.) When the cabbie phoned, I knew I’d have Harold Pinter all to myself for five minutes. Would I ask him about the mysteries of The Caretaker? His feelings about the first review of the Birthday Party? Or perhaps a chat about the current political situation?

I decided not to talk to him at all; he was tired and deserved silence after the chatter of the reception. I was concentrating so hard on my gift of silence that we spiralled down, past the Chamber, past the exit, and into the boiler room, a surreal bunker of pipes, tanks and gurgling sound. It was as if we’d walked into the entrails of a weird beast.

He looked around, shrugged, and said, ‘You know, if they go ahead with the invasion there’ll be civil disobedience in this country?’ I agreed and we spiralled up again to the waiting taxi. The civil disobedience didn’t happen, but I knew that despite his growing frailty he would have been among the first on the streets.

I’ve come relatively late to writing. Years of activism and working with troubled kids – most of them in Hackney – has given me rich material, and it’s an honour to be writing in Harold Pinter’s name. He has so much to teach writers; that elegance and balance of free flowing instinct with the conscious organising self, his extraordinary receptivity to the mysteries of the interior world - and passionate engagement with the external.

One of Pinter’s great gifts to us is the exposure of the language of institutions, and how people do, or do not act because of that language. This is of particular interest to me. Talking of institutions. I love the Hackney Empire – the National Theatre of the East End where Harold Pinter was president of the refurbishment appeal. Thanks are due to Frank Sweeney and Simon Thompsett for agreeing to the idea of the Harold Pinter room, (‘room’ is so evocative of Pinter that we avoided studio, and the very post modern ‘space’). I’d also like to thank Roland and Claire Muldoon whose visionary work and political commitment brought the Empire from a Bingo hall to a major London theatre, and the point where there can be a writer in residence.

Interesting things are already happening in the Pinter room. A group called ‘Writing the Visual’ meet monthly to workshop fiction that engages with the visual arts, and we’ve had a series of fascinating readings, ‘Illuminations’; dealing with the difficult and ‘unthinkable’. Both projects, I’m sure, would have been championed by Harold Pinter.

At the end of his Nobel acceptance speech he said this: ‘A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter or protection – unless you lie – in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.’

I intend to keep this close to my heart through my residency and beyond. I'm currently working on my short story collection Fugues on a Funny Bone to be published this autumn with the Muswell Press. This is a collaborative book with artist Richard Niman whose images accompany each story, some based on the interior lives of children I used to teach, others are about adult relationships.

My play Porn Crackers is drawn from one of these stories; Soho Square, a fictional account of my time as a film examiner at the British Board of Film Classification in 1991. It’s about two film examiners struggling with an embryonic relationship while having to view hard core pornography at work; a serious comedy questioning integrity between two people. There’s plenty of sex in it too. The play had two performances, directed by Ruth Boswell, at the Hackney Empire's Spice festival last July. I am now re-writing a fuller version based on audience feedback, to be produced at the Hackney Empire during my residency.

My longer term project is a novel based on the real life of a Polish expressionist painter, Stainislaw Frenkiel, who was also my teacher and friend. Our 'writing the visual' group at the Empire is supporting that work. Like many writers, my mind veers between several major projects; like having three allotments on the go.

June 16th , when the Pinter room was opened, was also Bloomsday, when Harold Pinter celebrated the work of his beloved James Joyce. Perhaps it can also be Pinter day, when Hackney honours this most important and cherished son.

This article first appeared in the Writers' Guild magazine, UK Writer (Autumn 2009)