It's a good thing Harold Pinter wrote when he did; his plays and screenplays would never get commissioned for television today. Have a quick read of last week's Guardian extract from a book by top TV drama commissioner John Yorke on how to write a screenplay, and it's clear that Pinter really hadn't a clue. If he was starting out today, he wouldn't even be invited to pitch an episode of Doctors.
In fact Yorke's rules, like those set out by other screenwriting gurus, make perfect sense for all kinds of genre drama, whether comical-pastoral, tragical-comical or pastoral-historical. But remains true that Pinter, the greatest stage and screen writer of the last half century, broke the lot. Which is why his plays will still be performed 100 years from now while 99% of the BBC and ITV's 'original British drama' will be long forgotten.
Back in the much-maligned 1960s, before most of today's TV drama commissioners were born, Pinter's plays were watched on the small screen by audiences of millions. In today's multi-channel world, the audience would be smaller, but it's still a scandal that the BBC today feels Pinter (and for that matter, Beckett or Chekhov or Stoppard) is too challenging for its mass audience.
Old Times, revived at the Harold Pinter theatre by Ian Rickson, only lasts 80 minutes, but contains more genuine drama than an entire year of BBC television. On the night I saw it, Kristin Scott Thomas was playing Kate and Lia Williams was playing Anna (the actresses have been alternating the roles since the play opened in January).
I had never seen Scott Thomas on stage before, and she's just as mesmerising as the reviewers say. I found myself watching her intently even when the other two characters were speaking, determined to catch every nuance of her enigmatic face, every hand gesture, every inclination of the body. I don't want to diminish Rufus Sewell (Deeley) or Lia Williams, but it's Scott Thomas who seems to me to be the ultimate Pinter actor.
Silence. Silence. Silence. Long silence. Silence. Pinter's stage directions are famously precise. But it strikes me now, after seeing Rickson's excellent production, how much space he leaves the director and the actors to interpret the play. Sewell, for example, plays Deeley as a bit of a jokester, who compensates for his inner insecurity with a parade of irritating mannerisms. And the geometry of three characters and three pieces of furniture allows the director an infinte number of spatial combinations, all of which give different possible meanings to the lines. There's a passage in which Anna and Deeley discuss how they might dry and powder Kate after her bath; Rickson reinforces the erotic subtext by placing the two actors only inches apart, as if they are about to embrace.
Not everyone, of course, has the chance to live close enough to London to see this wonderful production -- for which my ticket (admittedly with a restricted view) cost a bargain £10. Any BBC viewers in the far west of Cornwall who think paying their licence fee might entitle them to a bit of Pinter now and again should write to Broadcasting House, which will naturally ignore them.
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