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An Interview with Harold Pinter, Playwright Anne-Marie Cusac march 2001 q: Early on, you didn’t talk about some of your plays, like The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter, or The Hothouse, as political. But more recently you’ve started to talk about them that way. Why? harold pinter: Well, they were political. I was aware that they were political, too. But at that time, at whatever age I was—in my twenties—I was not a joiner. I had been a conscientious objector, you know, when I was eighteen. But I was a pretty independent young man, and I didn’t want to get up on a soapbox. I wanted to let the plays speak for themselves, and if people didn’t get it, to hell with it. q: What was your experience like as a conscientious objector? pinter: I was quite resolute. This was 1948, I remind you. And I was simply not, absolutely not, going to join the army. Because I had seen the Cold War beginning before the hot war was over. I knew the atom bomb had been a warning to the Soviet Union. I had two tribunals and two trials. I was prepared to go to prison. I was eighteen. It was a civil o¤ense, you know, not a criminal o¤ense. I had the same magistrate at both trials, and he Wned me twice. My father had to Wnd the money, which was a lot of money at the time, but he did. But I took my toothbrush with me to court both times. I was prepared to go to prison. And I haven’t changed a bit, I have to say. q: What changed your way of approaching your plays? pinter: I became less and less reticent about saying what I felt, and therefore I was able to talk about the plays in a slightly di¤erent way, too. I really did have a great jolt in 1973, when the Pinochet coup overthrew Allende. It really knocked me, as they say, for six. I was appalled and disgusted by it. And I knew how the CIA and the U.S. were behind the whole damn thing. So that really jolted me into another kind of political life. q: This appears on your website. “In 1958, I wrote the following: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’” But then you make the note, “I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them, but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen, I must ask: What is true? What is false?” Do these two ways of seeing and experiencing ever come into conXict for you? pinter: When you are writing a work of Wction, you’re inhabiting a very di¤erent kind of world from the world we actually live in every day of the week. It’s simply di¤erent, the world of imagination. You can’t make those determinations—about truth and lies—in what we loosely call a work of art. You’ve got to be open and 340 part 17 writers, musicians, & performers explore. You’ve got to let the world Wnd itself, speak for itself. Whereas, in the actual, practical, concrete world in which we live, it’s very easy, from my point of view, to see a distinction between what is true and what is false. Most of what we’re told is false. And the truth is, on the whole, hidden and has to be excavated and presented and confronted, all along the line. We are mostly told lies. Or, where we are not told lies, we are told a lot of bullshit . The actual propaganda of our democracies is palpably hypocritical. Who are they kidding? The trouble is, they do manage to kid an awful lot of people. That’s a terrible thing. And the complicity is a fact—the complicity between government, business, and media, which few people care to contemplate. The structures of power essentially treat people with contempt because that’s the way they survive. But they say the opposite. They say, “We love you.” It’s the Orwellian thing: “We’re taking the greatest care of you.” Even while they’re...

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