Spider Love is the contemporary development of a script by Mick Goldstein, one of Harold Pinter’s closest childhood - and life-long - friends. The present work-in-progress version co-commissioned by The Arts Centre at Edge Hill University and directed by Jen Heyes, has been developed by Mick’s son, Jeremy Goldstein, bejewelled with poetry from Pinter’s other close chum Henry Woolf, the only remaining member of the ‘Hackney Gang’.
The original private script was written by Mick in response to seeing a production of Harold Pinter's The Dwarfs in Melbourne in the early 1970s. One of Pinter’s less well-known works, the play was originally composed as a radio adaptation of a then unpublished novel, which was openly biographical in structure, and addressed the rigour, commitment and fragility of friendship.
Its central figure, the character of Len who seems to hallucinate the dwarfs of the title, was undeniably a version of Mick. No doubt being confronted by this fictional representation of himself, and of his own coping mechanism rendered as parable for navigating the fault-lines in male relationships, had an intoxicating impact on Mick, who purged the experience in writing his response.
In animating and augmenting this initial draft, Mick's son Jeremy navigates his own relationship with his dad through a process of deep empathy that is of a piece with his ambitions in the parallel production of theTruth to Power Café. In both works, and together, Jeremy confronts and finds peace with his own past and, in doing so, offers a cathartic set of experiences forCafé participants and audiences of both shows. Henry Woolf’s verse is set in both works, and his appearance on video adds charm to each backdrop. His poetry recalls the reliable sinews of close friendship, and offers glimpse of a lost community that, instead of just mobilising nostalgia, promotes a desire to construct that same solidarity in the present moment.
What Jeremy has brought to these projects, and what connects them - alongside the benevolent shadow cast by the Hackney Gang - is an ambition to understand and project not just what tears people apart, but what energies and self-awareness might finally bind them back together. Where Pinter’s work presented rigorous warnings of how our tendencies to betrayal and personal isolation cause rifts between friends, lovers and communities, Spider Love and Truth to Power Café seek to offer audiences a sense of their own agencies in repairing and recovering loss. Ultimately, these two works are about love which, though never easy, is ultimately our only answer.
Dr Mark Taylor-Batty, Professor of Theatre and Performance, University of Leeds; and Leader of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies Project November 2019
Photos: Sarah Hickson