...about a trigger-happy American president

A new comedy sketch by Harold Pinter – unearthed almost ten years after his death – is to premiere on the West End stage this week.

The scene features a trigger-happy American president who accidentally launches a nuclear attack on London.

It will be performed as part of a new season of the playwright’s work which starts in the West End on Thursday, with Dead Ringers impressionist Jon Culshaw, pictured,  playing the lead role

Pinter’s widow Lady Antonia Fraser found the sketch, The Pres And An Officer,  at their home in September, and told Radio 4’s flagship Today programme this morning: ‘It was the most extraordinary moment.

‘I was about to go to church and I had to make a note for something I was writing. I was in a hurry, so I grabbed one of Harold’s scared yellow pads which I’d preserved out of sentiment, on which he wrote - yellow legal pads, quite big. 

‘I’d never done it before, but I scribbled the note – something immensely boring about architecture in the City of London and 

tore off the top yellow page and I saw beneath his characteristic handwriting, there was this sketch…’

Lady Antonia added that the script held an ‘extraordinary’ resonance with today’s US political landscape.

Despite parallels between the gung-ho US President and the current occupant of the White House, she explained that it was never written with Trump in mind, since Pinter died in 2008, shortly after Barack Obama came to power when it was ‘a great time of hope for the US presidency’.

‘I couldn’t believe  when I read the sketch that he’d never heard of Trump, which he hadn’t,’ she added.

She was also keen to stress how funny the new piece was. ‘I sitting by by myself, roaring with laugher, which I hope he audience will,’ she said.

The new pieces will form part of the first the seven separate programmes of Pinter’s shorter works being performed at the West End theatre that bears his name from this Thursday.

Actors taking part include David Suchet, who told Radio 4: ‘I think Pinter is as well-known for his humour as he is well-known for his menace.

‘And I think there, if I can say so, is almost a summary of what Pinter’s writing is. He’s wonderfully humorous because he’s enigmatic and dangers as nothing is ever, ever what it seems.

‘There is nothing ever clear in Pinter’s plays; Harold would never want anything to be absolutely underlined and obvious and clear, including his humour.’

Lady Antonia added that whenever one of his comedy scenes didn’t get a laugh, her husband would muse: ’It’s the curse of Pinter. People think I’m enigmatic but I want them to laugh.’

The news comes ahead of a London stage season celebrating Pinter’s work at the West End theatre that bears his name, in which Suchet is one of the stars.

The season will also see Lee Evans coming out of retirement for the first time in four years to take part in Monologue, which Pinter wrote for the BBC in 1973, and other comedy sketches.

Other actors taking part include Keith Allen, Tamsin Greig, Danny Dyer, Martin Freeman and Jane Horrocks.

Published: 3 Sep 2018