Fathers and sons
How does it feel to act in a Pinter play for radio alongside the man himself? Samuel West reveals all
What have you done with the scissors? As first lines go, it's one of the best. In his Nobel prize lecture, Harold Pinter says that his play The Homecoming was engendered by this line, "which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me ... I had no further information. Someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them ... I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was, however, confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you mind if I change the subject?' ... So since B calls A 'Dad', it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son ... I didn't know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends."
We're doing The Homecoming for Radio 3, and Pinter is playing Max. As I write this, we're halfway through the three-day recording session; our beginnings never know our ends, but it seems to be going well. I play Lenny - character B in this case - so my job is to remain silent until I say to my dad: "Why don't you shut up, you daft prat?" It's fun saying this to the author, and he grins hugely at me.
A radio version is an excellent way to meet these disembodied voices, as the people they belong to coalesce out of the air. Pinter suggests that they first have existence as phantoms: "It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense, he is not welcomed by the characters. They resist him; they are not easy to live with; they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them."
We work fast - two takes at the most - but the cast (Pinter, Michael Gambon, Rupert Graves, Gina McKee and James Alexandrou) are consistently good, and the director, Thea Sharrock, has a nice line in economical, helpful notes. It must be daunting to direct the author of one of the great postwar British plays when he's also playing the lead, but Thea shows no sign of being daunted. My friend and mentor Steven Pimlott, who died last month, described directing as a bit like tuning in to a radio station: "You start with white noise ... You keep twiddling the knobs and then you hear a bit more. Gradually, everyone tunes into the wavelength."
Pinter is terrifying as Max, and fairly terrifying as himself. His smile lights up the room, but you never forget that you are in the presence of greatness. Writers and actors are very different beasts, and Pinter wears both hats well. The play lives in his bones. His illness has not dulled his sharpness. He seems to be enjoying the chance to work on The Homecoming, and update it: "flake off", a 1965 Lord Chamberlain-friendly euphemism, has properly become the much more mouthfilling "fuck off". (The swearing, and the length of the play, demand that we go out on Radio 3. Radio 4 audiences are thought not to be able to follow plays longer than 45 minutes, or to deal with "language".)
When Sheffield Theatres, of which I am artistic director, produced a Pinter celebration last autumn, it was a pleasure to welcome Harold and his friend Harry Burton, director of the acclaimed Dumb Waiter now playing at the Trafalgar Studios in London. They spoke of Yeats, the US midterm elections (the previous day), the re-election of Ortega in Nicaragua (that morning) and the recent atrocities in Iraq. They performed Harold's newest sketch, Apart from That. Harold read a poem he had written the night before. After an hour, we thought we ought to let him go, and it wasn't until they got offstage that Harry and Harold realised they hadn't discussed his plays at all. Nobody minded - the Sheffield audience simply enjoyed a man revelling in the furious energy of being alive in that moment.
One of the most brilliantly surprising events of our Pinter celebration was the screening of One for the Road. Michael Billington, Guardian theatre critic and biographer of Pinter, wrote: "Watching him play the sadistic interrogator in his own short, shocking play about political oppression, you realise he could have been a contender. Mixing muscular authority with flickering irony, he would have made a natural classical heavy ... Pinter has that quality of danger that defines all the best actors."
He is certainly dangerous here as Max, the growling patriarch. Hunched in his chair, he bites the words viciously, ripping into family members in a long-practised domestic style, planting savage verbal punches in superficially polite conversation. Max is completely unpredictable - one minute his dead wife, Jessie, is "the backbone of the family", the next she's "a slutbitch". (Jessie looms over the play like a Shakespearean absent mother, and the infighting between the three children does sometimes remind me of King Lear.) Pinter the writer will not allow us an easy conclusion. He has always had this fascinated, respectful attitude to his characters; they are never types. Pinter the actor doesn't comment, doesn't signal.
I can't say what the play is about. It's easier to say what happens. Before the action begins, Teddy, an East Ender, has secretly married Ruth and emigrated to America. Then he comes back with his new wife. The all-male household try to win the favours of his wife, and the play ends with the suggestion (voiced by Lenny) that they should take Ruth down to Greek Street and "put her on the game". Ruth seems to agree, but who is exploiting whom? She may be escaping a joyless marriage and manipulating all the men into giving her freedom and status. Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times chafed at "the complete absence from the play of any moral commitment whatsoever". We watch as Ruth finds a new role; she could be both Madonna and whore, and only Max senses what she might be up to: "She'll use us, she'll make use of us, I can tell you."
The naked violence, the vivid characters - Pinter says, "I love and detest the lot of them" - and the muscular, precise, witty dialogue make it a visceral pleasure to speak. It's a play I grew up with: in 1978, my father, Timothy West, played Max in the first West End revival. He was 43, only three years older than I am now. Michael Kitchen played Lenny, and I got my desire to play the part from watching him.
The transferring of well-known stage plays to radio entails some compromise. I remember going to Maida Vale Studios to record Tom Stoppard's Arcadia during the original National Theatre run. The advantage was that the cast knew the play and could perform without scripts. The disadvantage was that some pieces of Stoppard's brilliant stage business couldn't easily be transferred to radio. ("What's that in your hand, Gus? Is it an apple?") We have a similar concern in The Homecoming. Pinter's pauses make eloquent audio; the problem comes when someone makes a silent exit. To clarify the action, the maestro has agreed to one of Lenny's silent departures being accompanied by a new line: "Ta-ta." I'm immensely proud to be performing the world premiere of a Pinter line, albeit one only two syllables long.
When he was 25, my father wrote a radio play satirising over-explanatory wireless dialogue. It was called This Gun That I Have in My Right Hand Is Loaded. It's almost certainly the silliest thing he's ever done - adapted for radio by H and Cynthia Old-Hardwicke-Box, it contains some classic radio-speak ("A whisky? That's a strange drink for an attractive auburn-haired girl of 29") and cliches that have since become old friends of the family ("It's not a pretty sight - it's been in the water for some time", "Come now doctor; blackmail's an ugly word" and the classic "Is he ... ?" "I'm afraid so").
This Gun is still used in good drama schools to illustrate the pitfalls of the genre, but listening to the odd Afternoon Play, it's possible to conclude that writers have taken it as a blueprint rather than a cautionary tale. Good radio writing is a real art. I think a good radio play is better than any other sort of play, but by the same token, a bad one is so much worse. Radio is the most unforgiving medium, more revealing of untruth than any other. Nothing distracts you from whether you believe the reality of what you are hearing.
After the Homecoming read-through, Michael Gambon remarked to me: "If we were on stage, I wouldn't get this part." "They wouldn't get you," I reply, "the part's not big enough." "No, but he's a smaller man, isn't he? Shabby-smart." (Gambon is a good 6ft tall.) This illustrates two of the great advantages of radio drama - it's easier to get great actors for small roles, since they don't have to learn them and can do them quite quickly, and it's harder to be typecast. On stage I'd have a vanishingly small chance of being offered Lenny the violent East End pimp, but on radio, I can be younger, harder, more cockney. I can be someone else.
It's very demanding. Something about having to put all your concentration into your voice makes it incredibly tiring, and studios don't have windows (which roar) or clocks (which tick), so you record in something like a very untidy casino. The radio actor is surrounded by soundalike simulacra - the wooden door with three handles on it (1960s aluminium, 1900s brass, medieval iron), the bin of waste-tape that serves for walking on grass (on the spot, naturally) and the pot of dusty gravel for paths.
It's a wonderful apprenticeship - the BBC has a Radio Drama Repertory Company (my dad was in that, too), and, though much smaller than it was, it's still packed with talent. Every year the Carleton Hobbs bursary is given to one of them in memory of the distinguished radio actor; the roll call of previous winners is exceptional, and includes many of my favourite actors (Charles Kay, Patrick Godfrey, Jeremy Kemp, Ros Shanks, Richard Griffiths, Stephen Tompkinson, Angus Wright, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Emma Fielding, Simon Trinder, etc). All these people have the qualities that make an actor most employable - the ability to work in different styles quickly and truthfully, to change yourself the better to serve the play, and to be sincere when you can't use your eyes or your body to help you. We should celebrate them, and their faith in a great medium.
· Samuel West appears in Pinter's Betrayal at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 (0870 060 6624), from June 5. The Homecoming will be broadcast on Radio 3 tomorrow at 8pm
We're doing The Homecoming for Radio 3, and Pinter is playing Max. As I write this, we're halfway through the three-day recording session; our beginnings never know our ends, but it seems to be going well. I play Lenny - character B in this case - so my job is to remain silent until I say to my dad: "Why don't you shut up, you daft prat?" It's fun saying this to the author, and he grins hugely at me.
A radio version is an excellent way to meet these disembodied voices, as the people they belong to coalesce out of the air. Pinter suggests that they first have existence as phantoms: "It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense, he is not welcomed by the characters. They resist him; they are not easy to live with; they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them."
We work fast - two takes at the most - but the cast (Pinter, Michael Gambon, Rupert Graves, Gina McKee and James Alexandrou) are consistently good, and the director, Thea Sharrock, has a nice line in economical, helpful notes. It must be daunting to direct the author of one of the great postwar British plays when he's also playing the lead, but Thea shows no sign of being daunted. My friend and mentor Steven Pimlott, who died last month, described directing as a bit like tuning in to a radio station: "You start with white noise ... You keep twiddling the knobs and then you hear a bit more. Gradually, everyone tunes into the wavelength."
Pinter is terrifying as Max, and fairly terrifying as himself. His smile lights up the room, but you never forget that you are in the presence of greatness. Writers and actors are very different beasts, and Pinter wears both hats well. The play lives in his bones. His illness has not dulled his sharpness. He seems to be enjoying the chance to work on The Homecoming, and update it: "flake off", a 1965 Lord Chamberlain-friendly euphemism, has properly become the much more mouthfilling "fuck off". (The swearing, and the length of the play, demand that we go out on Radio 3. Radio 4 audiences are thought not to be able to follow plays longer than 45 minutes, or to deal with "language".)
When Sheffield Theatres, of which I am artistic director, produced a Pinter celebration last autumn, it was a pleasure to welcome Harold and his friend Harry Burton, director of the acclaimed Dumb Waiter now playing at the Trafalgar Studios in London. They spoke of Yeats, the US midterm elections (the previous day), the re-election of Ortega in Nicaragua (that morning) and the recent atrocities in Iraq. They performed Harold's newest sketch, Apart from That. Harold read a poem he had written the night before. After an hour, we thought we ought to let him go, and it wasn't until they got offstage that Harry and Harold realised they hadn't discussed his plays at all. Nobody minded - the Sheffield audience simply enjoyed a man revelling in the furious energy of being alive in that moment.
One of the most brilliantly surprising events of our Pinter celebration was the screening of One for the Road. Michael Billington, Guardian theatre critic and biographer of Pinter, wrote: "Watching him play the sadistic interrogator in his own short, shocking play about political oppression, you realise he could have been a contender. Mixing muscular authority with flickering irony, he would have made a natural classical heavy ... Pinter has that quality of danger that defines all the best actors."
He is certainly dangerous here as Max, the growling patriarch. Hunched in his chair, he bites the words viciously, ripping into family members in a long-practised domestic style, planting savage verbal punches in superficially polite conversation. Max is completely unpredictable - one minute his dead wife, Jessie, is "the backbone of the family", the next she's "a slutbitch". (Jessie looms over the play like a Shakespearean absent mother, and the infighting between the three children does sometimes remind me of King Lear.) Pinter the writer will not allow us an easy conclusion. He has always had this fascinated, respectful attitude to his characters; they are never types. Pinter the actor doesn't comment, doesn't signal.
I can't say what the play is about. It's easier to say what happens. Before the action begins, Teddy, an East Ender, has secretly married Ruth and emigrated to America. Then he comes back with his new wife. The all-male household try to win the favours of his wife, and the play ends with the suggestion (voiced by Lenny) that they should take Ruth down to Greek Street and "put her on the game". Ruth seems to agree, but who is exploiting whom? She may be escaping a joyless marriage and manipulating all the men into giving her freedom and status. Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times chafed at "the complete absence from the play of any moral commitment whatsoever". We watch as Ruth finds a new role; she could be both Madonna and whore, and only Max senses what she might be up to: "She'll use us, she'll make use of us, I can tell you."
The naked violence, the vivid characters - Pinter says, "I love and detest the lot of them" - and the muscular, precise, witty dialogue make it a visceral pleasure to speak. It's a play I grew up with: in 1978, my father, Timothy West, played Max in the first West End revival. He was 43, only three years older than I am now. Michael Kitchen played Lenny, and I got my desire to play the part from watching him.
The transferring of well-known stage plays to radio entails some compromise. I remember going to Maida Vale Studios to record Tom Stoppard's Arcadia during the original National Theatre run. The advantage was that the cast knew the play and could perform without scripts. The disadvantage was that some pieces of Stoppard's brilliant stage business couldn't easily be transferred to radio. ("What's that in your hand, Gus? Is it an apple?") We have a similar concern in The Homecoming. Pinter's pauses make eloquent audio; the problem comes when someone makes a silent exit. To clarify the action, the maestro has agreed to one of Lenny's silent departures being accompanied by a new line: "Ta-ta." I'm immensely proud to be performing the world premiere of a Pinter line, albeit one only two syllables long.
When he was 25, my father wrote a radio play satirising over-explanatory wireless dialogue. It was called This Gun That I Have in My Right Hand Is Loaded. It's almost certainly the silliest thing he's ever done - adapted for radio by H and Cynthia Old-Hardwicke-Box, it contains some classic radio-speak ("A whisky? That's a strange drink for an attractive auburn-haired girl of 29") and cliches that have since become old friends of the family ("It's not a pretty sight - it's been in the water for some time", "Come now doctor; blackmail's an ugly word" and the classic "Is he ... ?" "I'm afraid so").
This Gun is still used in good drama schools to illustrate the pitfalls of the genre, but listening to the odd Afternoon Play, it's possible to conclude that writers have taken it as a blueprint rather than a cautionary tale. Good radio writing is a real art. I think a good radio play is better than any other sort of play, but by the same token, a bad one is so much worse. Radio is the most unforgiving medium, more revealing of untruth than any other. Nothing distracts you from whether you believe the reality of what you are hearing.
After the Homecoming read-through, Michael Gambon remarked to me: "If we were on stage, I wouldn't get this part." "They wouldn't get you," I reply, "the part's not big enough." "No, but he's a smaller man, isn't he? Shabby-smart." (Gambon is a good 6ft tall.) This illustrates two of the great advantages of radio drama - it's easier to get great actors for small roles, since they don't have to learn them and can do them quite quickly, and it's harder to be typecast. On stage I'd have a vanishingly small chance of being offered Lenny the violent East End pimp, but on radio, I can be younger, harder, more cockney. I can be someone else.
It's very demanding. Something about having to put all your concentration into your voice makes it incredibly tiring, and studios don't have windows (which roar) or clocks (which tick), so you record in something like a very untidy casino. The radio actor is surrounded by soundalike simulacra - the wooden door with three handles on it (1960s aluminium, 1900s brass, medieval iron), the bin of waste-tape that serves for walking on grass (on the spot, naturally) and the pot of dusty gravel for paths.
It's a wonderful apprenticeship - the BBC has a Radio Drama Repertory Company (my dad was in that, too), and, though much smaller than it was, it's still packed with talent. Every year the Carleton Hobbs bursary is given to one of them in memory of the distinguished radio actor; the roll call of previous winners is exceptional, and includes many of my favourite actors (Charles Kay, Patrick Godfrey, Jeremy Kemp, Ros Shanks, Richard Griffiths, Stephen Tompkinson, Angus Wright, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Emma Fielding, Simon Trinder, etc). All these people have the qualities that make an actor most employable - the ability to work in different styles quickly and truthfully, to change yourself the better to serve the play, and to be sincere when you can't use your eyes or your body to help you. We should celebrate them, and their faith in a great medium.
· Samuel West appears in Pinter's Betrayal at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 (0870 060 6624), from June 5. The Homecoming will be broadcast on Radio 3 tomorrow at 8pm
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