Harold Pinter: The Man, The Mystery, The Speech Patterns

Ladies and gentlemen, I come before you today with a revelation:

Harold Pinter talked exactly like he wrote.

"...What? Are you crazy? Okay, Pinter's dialogue speaks fantastically, so much subtext to play with, so much subtext you can barely hear the text - but really? All those pauses, the fast-then-slow pacing of the lines, the deliberate delivery... That's a writing style. He didn't talk that way. No one talks that way."

Behold! Or rather, listen:



Part of the fun of this is how elegantly he squashes Charlie Rose's rather silly second question. But another part of it is the speech patterns. At first he's talking fast and matter-of-fact, sounding kind of like Lenny telling Ruth his intimidating stories. But then he starts to slow down and speak with deliberate pauses between words and thoughts. And those words and thoughts carry a lot more weight because of those pauses - that time spent thinking about them.

Here are two parts of a different interview he did on the BBC in 2006:



The first one starts off with a marvelously deadly understatement that I'm totally not going to spoil by talking about. But the fun kicks in when he and the interviewer establish a mini tug-of-war over who gets to speak. It's not a hostile thing at all - they're both very friendly and cordial, and they seem like they're having a great time. But there he is, speaking with those built-in pauses and taking the time to think about what he's saying, and I think it throws her off. She keeps cutting him off in this video (it kind of makes me want to smack her and say, "Let the man talk!"), and it takes her a while to get used to his speech patterns. And he doesn't give an inch - he doesn't hurry up, he doesn't make it any easier for her. She just has to figure it out and work with it.



The second one is a double whammy. He starts off talking about his performance of "Krapp's Last Tape," which is great fun. But the best part comes at around 3 minutes in, when the interviewer asks him if he can define what is stylistically "Pinteresque" about his plays. AND HE CAN'T! He freely (and endearingly) admits that he has no idea what a "Pinteresque" moment is. And I think it's because he wrote as he talked. You can hear the long pauses, the sudden rushes of words, the stories and maybe even the subtext. It was part of him, that style of speaking and writing - natural. And I'm starting to think that that's how you'd have to perform it - find a way to make it natural, because to him, that's what it was.