Eva Chaidemenou
Is Pinter a very English writer? Is he restricted to English audiences? Can foreigners totally appreciate Pinter's mastery of words? In my opinion, a non-English audience may be able to capture his genius but not his wordplay, which is almost impossible to translate. Would you agree?

Michael Billington
You pick out a wonderful paradox. Yes, Pinter is an extremely English writer. His choice of idiom is extremely English, indeed it's much based on East End, cockney Jewish language a lot of the time. Simon Grey once compared Pinter to Dickens in that he creates these exuberant larger-than-life characters. At the same time I've seen the plays in many foreign countries and audiences seem to grab the essential idea behind the play. They understand the terror, the insecurity, the fear that these characters are going through.

What I think is hard to achieve is an exact translation of the words themselves. There's a hilarious example from The Birthday Party from one of the characters, Goldberg or McCann, who says "Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?" This is an obtuse cricket reference which when the play was done in Germany was translated literally as "Who peed against the city gate in Melbourne?" which was meaningless rubbish.

I once asked Pinter's French translator who had done The Homecoming how you get into French "He'll be chuffed to his bollocks". He said it is very difficult. It's hard to achieve a precise rhythm of Pinter's language, but I still believe the plays are translatable in the broad sense in that they become understandable. So yes these plays are rooted in English life and phraseology but they also I think deal with larger universal concerns.

Christopher McLeish, Glasgow
To what extent are the tensions portrayed by Pinter, in his dramatic work, reflected in his personal life?

Michael Billington
The real connection, I think, between Pinter's life and work is in language. When I interviewed Pinter for my book, I would play back my tapes and listen to Pinter talking and what would astonish me is that the rhythm of his conversation is very like the rhythm of his plays. Pinter does speak with quite exaggerated pauses and with frequent hesitations. That to me is the real connection. I would not suggest to you that Pinter's average day is like any of his characters, thank goodness. I think that extraordinary dramatic poetry Pinter created in which language is often a camouflage or there is something going on underneath the dialogue that is not quite expressed comes from Pinter's own acute inner ear.

Brendan Ashton, Barrow in Furness
The dialogue in The Homecoming and The Caretaker is unsettling at times. Is this due to it being unreal or is it that I am used to plays only using dialogue that is a vehicle for the plot and anything else is superfluous? Or have I totally missed the point?

Michael Billington
What is unnerving about Pinter's dialogue is that it's familiar and realistic on one level and yet on another level it's not at all familiar. What is familiar immediately is the use of clauses and the use of everyday phrases and repetitions. What makes it unfamiliar is that Pinter then orchestrates this and uses this to create something slightly artificial. I think it's true of the settings and the worlds of these plays. If you look at The Homecoming, yes it's taking place in a house in Hackney such as you could walk into today. But the things that happen in which a family appropriate the wife of their brother or their son and attempt to use her as a prostitute, is not I assume an everyday occurrence. So the plays constantly inhabit a world that is partly real and partly grotesque and imaginary. I think that's what gives these plays such power over our imagination. We both understand the language and the setting and yet there is something there that is beyond explanation.

Alison E Bayne, North Yorkshire
In everyday life, how does Harold react to uncomfortable silences?

Michael Billington
I'd say in real life, Pinter doesn't really react to uncomfortable silences but often creates them. When I listen back to my tape recordings with Pinter in my book, I was stunned by the long gaps between words. It was largely because he was almost searching for the exact word and the exact means of expression, wanting to be understood as clearly as possible. There is a staccato rhythm to Pinter's conversation that is the same as you find in the plays. Peter Hall has said all the dramatists he knows speak much as they write, or that if you want to understand the rhythm of their plays you have to listen to the rhythm of their conversation. Peter Shaffer, for example, will talk with a mellifluous fluency, Harold Pinter will talk in everyday conversation with a sometimes jerky hesitancy. So silences in Pinter's plays are partly a reflection of the silences you find in Pinter's life.

Maarten Poiesz, Amsterdam
To what extent do you think the image of language as a weapon or means of power throughout Pinter's plays can be seen as a crystallisation of the language of political (particularly totalitarian) regimes?

Michael Billington
I think this is a very profound point about Pinter. It's often been observed that Pinter's personal and domestic plays have a political edge, quite simply because they are about the struggle for domination and authority over other people. Equally, Pinter's political plays show how language itself is a tool of domination. It therefore becomes a metaphor for the political process, to take a very clear example, a play like The Caretaker, may simply seem to be a play about an old, scruffy, vagrant who comes into a house and tries to manipulate two brothers and play one off against the other. It actually is a microcosmic study of the political process. What it shows is the character misjudging the political situation with fatal consequences. But in his use of language, Davies also tries to achieve some kind of stability in his household just as Mick attempts to bully him through his use of language. Yes, language in Pinter is always part of the mechanism of power that gives a political edge to almost everything he's ever written.

Life & Work | Individual Plays | Billington's Biography | Acting | Specific Themes | Influence & Influences