Bennett plays down the op, gags on Pinter

With Pinter passing and Alan Ayckbourn labouring with ill health, it’s a little unsettling to discover that Alan Bennett — who has had his own struggle with cancer — has undergone another serious operation to deal with a rare form of stomach aneurysm; this happened last April and he’s all clear now.

Maybe we knew about this last April, but I don’t recall anything in the papers. And why should I, when you come to think about it. Alan Bennett makes little fuss about his everyday life until he publishes a selection from his diary each New Year’s day in the London Review of Books. Which is where we now learn about the seven-hour operation in University College Hospital.

If Bennett’s treatment and after-care was anything like as good as mine following a mere five-hour op two years ago in the same hospital, he’ll be hunky dory. Bennett describes the ordeal with typical diffidence and goes home in time for the Mayor of London elections on 1 May: “My first outing is to the local community centre to vote against the dreadful Boris.”

And that’s it, as far as Boris Johnson is concerned. We learn more detail about his bequest of his literary archive to the Bodleian in Oxford and he dispels any doubt about the worthiness of his motives as opposed to the “cahiers for cash” sale of papers by some playwrights — Stoppard and Hare for starters– to the University of Austin, Texas.

Bennett says the Bodleian was the only offer he had, though he is also on record as saying he likes the idea of giving something back to the university that educated him after winning a state scholarship from his grammar school.  

The rest of the excerpts are full of treasurable nuggets about picnic lunches, bicycle rides in Camden Town and the gift (by composer George Fenton) of a renovated old black coat made by Proust’s tailor.

Gags abound, too, the best of which is the one fired back at John Fortune who rang to tell Bennett that a group of super-rich Arabs he and John Bird had performed cabaret to in Dubai were accompanied by wives dressed in burqas styled by top Arab fashion designers; “Oh,” quips Bennett (pertly, he says), “you mean like Yves Saint Laurent of Arabia.”

It was Bennett who, when asked about an imminent major birthday of Harold Pinter, said that, for once, a two minute silence would be entirely appropriate. There have been too few laughs about Harold in the past few days. He was not only a funny man, but also incidentally funny in his occasional fits of grandeur and pomposity.

His old friend Simon Gray — who once wrote a television play featuring the nation’s greatest living dramatist, Hector Partt (played by Richard Wilson) — got him down to a tee in his hilarious diaries, never more so than in the two explosive Pinter outbursts at the Lyric, Hammersmith.

In the first, Pinter mobilised the entire West London police force in a search for his allegedly stolen car that was found three hours later parked at the front entrance to the theatre. He’d left it there. It had been there all the time.

In the second, he turned with a fury on a poor girl on the till in the theatre cafe who dared to ask him if he was “with the company” and therefore entitled to a special rate on his lunch tray. “Who the hell do you think I am,” fumed the distinguished dramatist,”some stinking old wino just turning up here on the offchance of a cheap meal? How dare you…” etc, etc.

The irony of this, of course, is that it was the Lyric, Hammersmith where The Birthday Party was first seen and flopped in 1958. At the end of that short (one week) run, Pinter slunk into the circle and was accosted by an usherette, and questioned (not for the last time) on his identity. He meekly replied that he was the author. “Oh, you poor thing…” said the lady. The outburst at the lunch counter was no doubt Pinter’s revenge on the whole pack of front of house staff at the Lyric. What a great and  grandiose prick he could be.

It’s hard to think of Bennett, or indeed any other British playwright, behaving in so ridiculous, or ridiculously funny, a manner. Which is why Tom Stoppard hit the spot when he suggested that, as there were no plans to re-name the Comedy Theatre in honour of the playwright who had seen so many of his works put on there, Pinter should change his name to Harold Comedy. Then he  would have a theatre named for him after all…you can see that great brow furrowing ferociously even now through the grey winter clouds.