Stockholm. Evening. Harold Pinter is introduced to the Swedish Academy. He enters from stage left. He wears a loose-fitting tuxedo.
PINTER: Your Majesty. Members of the Academy. Ladies and Gentlemen.
(beat)
PINTER: Thank you for this honour.
(pause)
Pinter removes a pistol from his tuxedo jacket and places it on the podium.
PINTER: When I began writing, I had no such aspirations, but I can see the logic of your choice. And yet . . . it seems as though this took too long for you to realize it. Do you see?
(pause)
PINTER: We live in an age of menace. Of dangers both spoken . . . and left to our impoverished imaginations, assaulted as they are by technology, faith and above all, politics. We live in an age of menace.
(beat)
PINTER: I do thank you for this honour . . .
Pinter places his hand next to the pistol on the podium.
(pause)
PINTER: But I am uncertain about how to respond to the tribute, tardy as it is …
(beat)
Pinter taps his fingers next to the pistol.
PINTER: Yes, we live in an age of menace. Of evil that is banal. Civilization itself, it seems, is a thin pretense. Language is used to obscure and distort reality. Because we fear it?
(pause)
PINTER: And so, tonight, I would have you all think about that.
(pause)
(pause)
Pinter taps fingers again.
(pause)
Wanda and James fell in love when they were performing the off-off-off-Broadway production of Sid Whelp’s Mutant Buggery Marginal Headlice Bingo Floormop Pastrami-on-Rye Asphalt Follies. (Usually shortened to “The Mutant Follies”.) In addition to their love of the theatre, they shared a unique faith; they both belonged to an obscure sect of Zoroastrianism in which acolytes were sent forth into the world to torment unsuspecting minor officials by lacing their undergarments with Ben-Gay.