The stars turned out in force last night for a celebration of the work of Harold Pinter, who died last December. Jude Law and Penelope Wilton rushed straight from a matinee of Hamlet to join the glittering onstage ensemble at the Olivier theatre – one that included Jeremy Irons, Colin Firth, Alan Rickman, Lindsay Duncan, Eileen Atkins, Janie Dee and a host of others for whom the memory of Pinter is strong and abiding.
The form of the evening, which was directed by Ian Rickson, had a crystalline, Pinteresque clarity. No eulogies, speeches or florid tributes: simply a focus on the work itself, revealing Pinter's poetry and polemical vigour. If Pinter's generosity came across, it was in some of his prose pieces. Douglas Hodge read three extracts from Pinter's portrait of the great Irish actor, Anew McMaster, in which Pinter recalled playing Iago to McMaster's Othello before a riotously drunken Saint Patrick's Day audience. Sam West also reminded us of Pinter's affectionate tribute to the great Somerset bowler, Arthur Wellard.
The passion and humour of Pinter's plays was also richly represented. We had David Bradley and Colin Firth doing speeches from The Caretaker: the one evoking the vagrant aggression of Davies, the other the desolate pathos of Aston. We had Eileen Atkins and Sheila Hancock in the sketch The Black and White, as two old women keeping death at bay. I was also constantly reminded of the erotic tension in Pinter's work. Lia Williams in The Homecoming, the sinuous Gina McKee and the svelte Lindsay Duncan in Old Times, and Janie Dee and Michael Sheen in Betrayal, all reminded us of Pinter's ability to raise the sexual temperature to boiling point.
But it wasn't simply an evening of famous names – and here I must declare an interest. At the climax, nine students from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, who I directed last year, performed an abbreviated version of Pinter's Nobel lecture. I am hardly objective, but their energy and attack was deeply moving in that it showed the baton of Pinter performance being passed from one generation to the next. But perhaps the last word should lie with the poetry. To hear three of Pinter's love-poems to his wife, Antonia Fraser, was to find one's eyes pricked with tears, and to be reminded of a great playwright's understanding of the heart's affections.