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Interview: Pinter play that gives pause for thought
WHEN he planned to stage Pinter's The Homecoming, Damian Cruden couldn't have known the timing would be so poignant.
The master playwright (director, actor, screenwriter) died on Christmas Eve last year. His legacy is a collection of some of the greatest plays written in the English language. Cruden, artistic director of York Theatre Royal, put The Homecoming into the theatre's schedule over a year ago.
The play is being staged immediately after The White Crow, a play by Donald Freed, a contemporary and friend of Pinter's. The two plays would add meat and depth to an otherwise light-hearted season. "With Donald's play The White Crow planned in, I thought it was a nice idea to stage The Homecoming immediately afterwards," says Cruden.
"The pair of them shared a similar style and a sense of a passion for politics in their plays." First staged in 1965, The Homecoming centres on a family of men and a woman brought into the fold by one of them. Aggression, suppressed violence and an exploration of misogyny all appear in the play.
The play opens tomorrow and the rehearsal period has given Cruden an opportunity to explore what he considers the best play written by one of Britain's most important playwrights.
"His plays are either good, great or classics and this is one of his classics," says Cruden.
"It is definitely one of the top 10 plays of the 20th century, the one which puts him up there with the likes of Beckett, Miller and Shaw."
Pinter has become known for his pauses, which litter his plays and have inspired the adjective Pinteresque.
Cruden says: "Because of this he was parodied as the notion of the anally retentive playwright, but there are two things here – he is not the only playwright who uses pauses and they are never arbitrarily dropped into the script. "Each pause is packed full – they are always loaded with the past, the present and the future."
With Pinter's death late last year, does this mean that his work will be revisited more often? Cruden thinks perhaps not. "He can't become more important to British theatre because it's impossible," says Cruden. "He will also always remain a challenging artist – he will never pass into popular culture, because his work is challenging. What is great is that he will continue to be discovered by the young and to them he will always be enigmatic and interesting – which is how his reputation will live on."
York Theatre Royal, tomorrow, to June 20. Box office: 01904 623568.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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