Alice Jones in The Independent:
As he approaches his 75th birthday on Monday, Harold Pinter appears frail and gaunt, leaning heavily on a walking stick decorated, somewhat incongruously, with sparkly stickers. When we meet to celebrate the unveiling of his latest work, Voices, he tells me: “I’m exhausted, I’m at the end of my tether,” and admits that he is “not writing anything much at the moment”. His formerly stentorian stage voice is notably weakened – a consequence of his battle with cancer of the oesophagus over the last three years. But in Voices, a 29-minute musical-dramatic collaboration with the composer James Clarke, his creative voice rings out as powerfully as ever.
This latest work by the indefatigable playwright will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on his birthday. In February, Pinter appeared to herald his retirement as a playwright, announcing with characteristic terseness: “I think I’ve stopped writing plays now… I’ve written 29 plays, isn’t that enough?”
But there was never really any danger that Pinter, a self-professed “bit of a pain in the arse”, was going to bow out of the limelight for good.
More here.
