"When Samuel West asked Harold Pinter to write a poem for the Crucible theatre in Sheffield, the Nobel Prize-winner was only too happy to oblige.
His eight-line work, Laughter, was duly despatched and Pinter was informed that West, at the time the theatre's artistic director, was so delighted with it that he planned to project his words onto one of the playhouse's outside walls to publicise a literacy festival it was hosting.
The 77-year-old author has, however, been aghast to learn that the theatre has now had second thoughts. There were concerns that Pinter's poem, which talked of death and 'severed heads', could upset mourners attending funerals at churches near the building.
Pinter doesn't take kindly to any kind of censorship and is, I am told, incandescent about the turn of events. Mandrake is, however, happy to give his words an airing:
Laughter dies out but is never dead
Laughter lies out the back of its head
Laughter laughs at what is never said
It trills and squeals and swills in your head
It trills and squeals in the heads of the dead
And so all the lies remain laughingly spread
Sucked in by the laughter of the severed head
Sucked in by the mouths of the laughing dead..."
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