Pinter’s ghost stalked the tiny stage of the Bolton Little Theatre 65 years after the Nobel laureate arrived penniless at Trinity Street station, hired to rehearse with a cast of amateurs after the disastrous London premiere of his first full length play. He had been working as a jobbing actor, snow shifter and night club doorman, sometimes signing on the dole, after The Birthday Party was rubbished by Fleet Street critics.
Bolton Little Theatre
A year later the Bolton Little Theatre (BLT) offered to pay the “threadbare” playwright to come and rehearse the jinxed play with amateurs, performing on an intimate stage they had created in an old forge by a gasworks.
Pinter was on stage when the Bolton Evening News turned up for a rehearsal photo call in November 1959. In the picture caption he is unnamed, standing in for an absent actor who would be playing Stanley Webber, the hunted, unhinged central character of the play.
The only English playwright ever to win a Nobel Prize never forgot his week in Bolton. His own copy of the 1959 Little Theatre programme has turned up in his archive at the British Library.
His rehearsals in Bolton and his nights sharing a stone cottage with the leading lady of the BLT were all but forgotten until director Simon Mott announced a new BLT production of the “brilliantly disturbing comedy of menace and mayhem”.
Pinter in the 1950s
When the Bolton-born Fleet Street theatre critic Irving Wardle died at 93 in 2023, his friend Michael Shipley recalled how Wardle had persuaded the BLT to ask Pinter’s permission to perform the play and how Pinter had insisted on supervising rehearsals with Wardle’s step-mother, Norma Wilson, directing.
The leading lady in 1959 was Sarah Wright, 29, an art teacher who invited Pinter to stay with her in a two-up two-down stone cottage in the moorland village of Belmont.
Michael Shipley, a retired solicitor who has acted, directed and produced plays at the Little Theatre for more than 70 years said:
“Norma Wilson was a very difficult woman at times, albeit a very talented one. The reputation of BLT was very high, often because of her talents.
“Sarah never so much as told me that she and Pinter had a brief affair but she always said they had a great time together at the house. It was one of her happiest memories.”
Pinter returns to Bolton
Last week, director Simon Mott staged the unnerving play in exactly where Pinter was standing in the 1959 rehearsal photo call. Mott recalled the famous words of the Sunday Times critic, Harold Hobson, whose review appeared too late to save the original London production:
“There is something in your past – it does not matter what – which will catch up with you. Though you go to the uttermost parts of the earth, and hide yourself in the most obscure lodgings in the least popular of towns, one day there is a possibility that two men will appear. They will be looking for you and you cannot get away. And someone will be looking for them too. There is terror everywhere.”
Peter Scofield, who played Goldberg, said, “I saw my part as the sort of well-dressed enforcer who would have hung around the East End in the days of the Kray twins. Pinter knew about fear.” Goldberg was the part Pinter chose for himself when BBC Two screened the play in 1987, with Ulster-born Colin Blakely as McCann, the Belfast enforcer, Ken Cranham as Stanley, Joan Plowright as Meg and Julie Walters as Lulu.
Last week in Bolton, as Ashley Hambrook, Ben Latham, Catherine Henderson and Kim Riley-Shipperbottom took those parts, a Little Theatre stalwart, June Grice, said, “I was thinking of Sarah Wright playing Meg here in 1959. I had no idea she had rehearsed with Pinter. In her young days she was the Juliet of all Little Theatre productions. I acted as her twin in a production at this theatre. She died a few years ago but I still have one of her paintings.”
The final word goes to Mott, who said last week, “I hadn’t heard about Pinter coming to Bolton until I saw the Yorkshire Bylines story. It gave us all an extra twist in this comedy of menace and mayhem”.
