Guardian: Passionate Pinter's devastating assault on US foreign policy

Passionate Pinter's devastating assault on US foreign policy

Shades of Beckett as ailing playwright delivers powerful Nobel lecture

Michael Billington
Thursday December 8, 2005
The Guardian

There was something oddly Beckettian about Harold Pinter's Nobel
lecture, which was broadcast yesterday by More4, and which even now is
blazing its way across the world's media. It was Beckettian in that
Pinter sat in a wheelchair, with a rug over his knees and framed by an
image of his younger self, delivering his sombre message: memories of
Hamm in Beckett's Endgame came to mind. But if Pinter's frailty was
occasionally visible, there was nothing ailing about his passionate and
astonishing speech, which mixed moral vigour with forensic detail.

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In fact, the speech was all the more powerful because it was delivered
in a husky, throaty rasp. The facts are that Pinter, having recovered
from cancer of the oesophagus, was earlier this year stricken by a
condition in the mouth which affected his vocal chords. Then 10 days
ago he was re-admitted to hospital with severe leg pains. But he
briefly emerged on Sunday to record his Nobel speech, and the good news
is that he should be back home early next week.
Although the speech obviously was a physical strain to deliver, it was
impressively structured. It began with Pinter talking about his art -
something he rarely does in public. In particular, he drew a clear
distinction between the necessary ambivalence of art and the duty of
the citizen to ask: "What is true? What is false?" Pinter even gave
fascinating examples of the way in which his plays start with a line, a
word or an image and then proceed on their journey into the unknown.

Warming to his theme, Pinter argued that while language is, for the
dramatist, an ambiguous transaction, it is something that politicians
distort for the sake of power. And, in making his point, Pinter
deployed a variety of tactics: the charged pause, the tug at the
glasses, the unremitting stare at the camera. I am told by Michael
Kustow, who co-produced the lecture, that after a time he stopped
giving Pinter any instructions. He simply allowed him to rely on his
actor's instinct for knowing how to reinforce a line or heighten
suspense.

Although the content of the speech was highly political, especially in
its clinical dissection of post-war US foreign policy, it relied on
Pinter's theatrical sense, in particular his ability to use irony,
rhetoric and humour, to make its point. This was the speech of a man
who knows what he wants to say but who also realises that the message
is more effective if rabbinical fervour is combined with oratorical
panache.

At one point, for instance, Pinter argued that "the United States
supported and in many cases engendered every rightwing military
dictatorship in the world after the end of the second world war". He
then proceeded to reel off examples. But the clincher came when Pinter,
with deadpan irony, said: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened.
Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It
was of no interest." In a few sharp sentences, Pinter pinned down the
willed indifference of the media to publicly recorded events. He also
showed how language is devalued by the constant appeal of US presidents
to "the American people". This was argument by devastating example. As
Pinter repeated the lulling mantra, he proved his point that "The words
"the American people" provide a truly voluptuous cushion of
reassurance." Thus Pinter brilliantly used a rhetorical device to
demolish political rhetoric.

But it was the black humour of the speech I liked best. At one point,
Pinter offered himself as a speechwriter to President Bush - an offer
unlikely, on this basis of this speech, to be quickly accepted. And
Pinter proceeded to give us a parody of the Bush antithetical technique
in which the good guys and the bad guys are thrown into stark contrast:
"My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God
was bad except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not
barbarians." Pinter's poker face as he delivered this only reinforced
its satirical power.

One columnist predicted, before the event, that we were due for a
Pinter rant. But this was not a rant in the sense of a bombastic
declaration. This was a man delivering an attack on American foreign
policy, and Britain's subscription to it, with a controlled anger and a
deadly irony. And, paradoxically, it reminded us why Pinter is such a
formidable dramatist. He used every weapon in his theatrical technique
to reinforce his message. And, by the end, it was as if Pinter himself
had been physically recharged by the moral duty to express his
innermost feelings.

· Michael Billington is the Guardian's theatre critic

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1661931,00.html

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