admin @ Tue, 2005-10-11 11:01
His last stage work, Celebration (2000), set in a smart London restaurant, needs more actors than most of his plays - nine. Let me name those who read it onstage at the Gate on Saturday: Michael Gambon, Sinead Cusack, Derek Jacobi, and Penelope Wilton (as the party at one table), Jeremy Irons and Janie Dee (as the couple at another), Stephen Rea (as the waiter), Donna Dent (as the waitress), and Stephen Brennan (as the proprietor). It is the funniest play that Pinter ever wrote - and the speech in which Sukie recalls her days (not long ago) as an excitable plump young secretary can never have been funnier than on this occasion. Jacobi and Gambon sang their little Cockney ditties together as if they had been rehearsing for days, though in fact Gambon had only arrived that morning.
At the end of curtain calls, the cast applauded Pinter in the audience; the audience rose to give him a standing ovation, and he came to the stage to shake the hand of each member of the cast. The next day, Lia Williams flew in to join the others for a reading of his sketches,his speeches and hispoems: she recited - with heart-stoppingly suspenseful pauses - Ruth's speech from The Homecoming, "I move my leg", a speech that evokes sex, allure, female independence - and exile. How many astounding non-sequiturs there are in Pinter's work! His touch is never more sure than in his feeling for the illogicality of human beings.
During the second half, Pinter joined the actors onstage. He walks with a stick now, and does not like to stand more than is necessary. Who present will forget what it was like to watch his stern composure as Gambon, Jacobi and Rea read the poems on cancer and death? At the end, his voice amplified, he paid simple thanks to everybody. He then mentioned Antonia Fraser. Thirty years ago, soon after they began their relationship, they spent a few days together in Paris: about which he wrote Paris, a poem of burning lyricism. Now, the day before his 75th birthday, Pinter recited it from memory. It ends: "She dances in my life. The white day burns." Then, gesturing simply to where Fraser sat in the audience, he said: "And there she is." On this note of ardour, this great event came to a close. The audience stood to cheer. Hearts were full. The Pinter landscape had been drawn in full.
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