Sunday, September 01, 2019

Pinter and Samuel Becket

Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett

Pinter discovered Beckett’s work in the early 1950s when, working as an actor in Ireland, he read a fragment of Beckett’s novel Watt in a poetry magazine. 

Desperate to find out more about the unknown writer, he soon after managed to locate a copy of Beckett’s Murphy, and saw Waiting for Godot at the Arts Theatre in London in 1955. Pinter later called Beckett ‘the greatest writer of our time’  The impact that Beckett’s work had on Pinter was profound and enduring.

Pinter and Beckett met for the first time when Pinter went to Paris in 1961 for a production of The Caretaker. 

Beckett drove them from bar to bar in his little Citroën until, at four in the morning, Pinter fell asleep on a table, overcome with indigestion and heartburn from all the alcohol, tobacco and excitement. 

He awoke to find Beckett with a tin of bicarbonate of soda which he’d been all over Paris to find – the soda did the trick and a lifelong friendship was born. 

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