Educational Media Reviews Online

Harold Pinter, the British playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, is famous for the number of time a pause or silence is indicated in his plays. For Pinter, a pause is just a moment to gather one’s thoughts and silence is when nobody knows how to deal with what is said. But Pinter believes many productions have gone overboard with the number and duration of pauses and silences, and his wife has taken to calling the situation the “curse of Pinter.” When Pinter acts in his own plays, sometimes he will omit a pause or silence that he feels would not have meaning in the performance.

This is one of the insights we get in Working with Pinter, a one-hour video made for Channel 4 in Britain. Pinter talks with his friend of 40 years, director Harold Woolf, and observes workshop performances of scenes from Pinter plays The Dumb Waiter, No Man’s Land, and Old Times with Woolf and the video’s director Harry Burton. There are also clips from television productions of Pinter’s The Room and One for the Road.

The Room was Pinter’s first play and was first staged in 1957 at Bristol University in a production directed by Woolf. As Pinter explains in the video, The Room has its genesis in a scene Pinter witnessed at a party. Quentin Crisp, the writer famous for his flamboyant manner, served food and drink to a very large man who said nothing the whole time, while Crisp talked incessantly. The image of a silent person being served food stayed with Pinter and he expanded on that to create the play.

The scenes shown from Pinter’s plays are not compelling in and of themselves. Taken out of their context, they suffer, although theater students may find it interesting in how the lines are read. Of greater value are comments Pinter makes in the video on acting (it’s an intuitive process and relying solely on technique makes for a superficial performance), rewriting his plays during rehearsals (he doesn’t do it, except for The Homecoming when he had to change the name of a road he had wrong), and theater itself (it can be a political tool, and the powers that be would prefer that it be eradicated).

Students studying Pinter and theatergoers who are ardent fans of his are the best audiences for this video. It’s recommended for colleges and universities with strong theater programs and public libraries that collect intensively in performing arts.