Guest Blog: Harry Burton On A Zoom Production of Harold Pinter's THE DWARFS

The name Harold Pinter does different things for different people, but it's a name that comes around with persistent regularity. Witness this week: a few days away from his 90th birthday, Sky Arts are showing a new documentary about Pinter, made by his friend Danny Dyer.

And this Friday, the industry website www.runatitshouting.co.uk will broadcast a Zoom rehearsed reading of Pinter's The Dwarfs, a stage adaptation of his early experimental novel about growing up in Hackney in the aftermath of World War II. I get to direct a brilliant young cast featuring Stacy Martin, Charlie MacGechan, Lewis Rainer and Ossian Perret.

If you're an old lag like me, there's nothing like a dose of passionate youth to give you a shake-up. Happily, early in lockdown the aforementioned Charlie (who I hadn't heard from in a decade) got in touch out of the blue to invite me onto his Zoom platform to run a Pinter workshop. I was impressed to discover that Charlie was already hosting people like Mike Leigh, Amma Asante and Bruce Robinson. Furthermore, he was giving the money raised from these nourishing events to organisations on the pandemic frontline.

One thing led to another. In the light of domestic violence spiking by 50% in lockdown, Charlie next had the idea to mount an online theatrical event to fundraise for The NIA Project, a Hackney charity which works to end violence against women and girls. He approached the Harold Pinter Estate, who granted him a license for one performance of The Dwarfs, and now here we are in rehearsals with these talented actors, most of whom are having the exciting experience of exploring Pinterland for the first time.

It's not much of a strain to observe a parallel for young people between the beginning of the 1950s and the very weird world we find ourselves occupying in 2020. In 1950, Pinter and his fellowship of youthful, poetry-loving existentialist intellectuals (mythologised as the Hackney Gang) perceived themselves to be inheriting a world apparently primed to self-destruct at any moment. The Cold War was cranking up, as were predictions that the world would starve to death within 50 years.

To Pinter's predominantly Jewish Hackney Gang, permanently horrified by recent events in Europe, it seemed unlikely they would live long enough to see their potential come to fruition. Their response was to commit totally to the freedom of the moment, to reject tradition and to forge their own path.

Talking to Karen Ingala Smith, CEO of The NIA Project, it was fascinating to detect parallels between the present day explosion of domestic violence, and the world of Pinter's youthful but insecure male characters: "We need," Karen told me, "to talk about how men seem very capable of controlling themselves with other men, at work for example, but then claim they can't control themselves in their relationships with their women."

The modern world - which, in its scientific wisdom, has done away entirely with the organised rites of passage that existed for millennia before we had "progress" - faces the huge problem of how to reintroduce education for young men in how to temper the eruptive energies that kick in with volcanic force around puberty. Pinter's story doesn't offer simple solutions. But it does feature a savvy, sensitive young woman who realises that things are turning nasty with her man. She does what she has to do to get away from him.

The show goes out live on Zoom at 7pm (London) on 25 September. We hope you'll be there.

Book tickets here, and watch a trailer below!

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