Introduction: Harold Pinter’s transmedial histories

This article introduces the special issue by exploring the transmediality of Harold Pinter's work. By examining Pinter's texts across television, radio and cinema, as well as theatre, this article argues that both Pinter's formal experimentation and development as a cultural figure are intimately connected to his consistent practice of working across a variety of media.


Theatre into broadcasting
In the late 1950s Pinter was pursuing a moderately successful career as an actor, and it was while he was performing in a touring production of the comedy Doctor in the House 12 that he wrote his second full-length play The Birthday Party. 13owever, the play's London reviews were very poor and it took several years for Pinter to achieve a reputation in mainstream theatre.Earlier in the decade, Pinter had also pursued radio acting roles, writing a series of letters to BBC Drama Department staff including Donald McWhinnie (a later champion of Pinter's), Frank Hauser, John Arlott, David Manderson and Terence Tiller, inquiring about interviews for acting or reading parts following the suggestion of R. D. Smith, a BBC radio producer. 14But he received either rejections or apologetic notes asking him to try at a later date; replies that addressed him as 'Miss' (John Arlott) or spelt his surname 'Puiter' (Frank Hauser) must have been particularly dispiriting.In one audition report, Pinter was dubbed 'Herbert Pinta', and the correction from 'Pinta' to 'Pinter' was only made in pen on the typed rejection letter from Shirley Newham in the Features Department. 15It would take a few years for him to make his name.
Despite this inglorious start, Pinter was by the 1960s a regular voice on the radio, particularly as a poetry reader, for arts documentaries and, as his career developed, for interviews and commentaries on contemporary culture. 16By 1959, BBC Drama had commissioned his first broadcast play A Slight Ache for its highbrow Third Programme radio service and ITV television was in the vanguard of establishing the canonical status that Pinter would go on to have.An early version of A Slight Ache, titled Something in Common, was rejected, though McWhinnie identified Pinter as a playwright deserving of BBC patronage and encouraged support be given to the young playwright. 17Rewritten on commission, A Slight Ache was reviewed by both the radio and television BBC departments.The work was identified as suited best for radio, though the television drama reviewer Oliver Marlow Wilkinson encouraged the BBC to commission Pinter for a television play. 18A Slight Ache was subsequently adapted for staging at the Arts Theatre in London in 1961.Pinter's affinity for radio writing was confirmed by his use of the medium's aesthetic possibilities in the play, what his biographer Michael Billington calls the 'ambiguous possibilities of radio', exemplified by the named but silent match seller character. 19By the end of his career, Pinter had produced upwards of thirty scripts for radio, ranging from original texts commissioned by the BBC to adaptations of his stage, television and prose works.Although we might think of Pinter primarily as a theatre writer, broadcasting was crucial to his early career and continued to be so.The Birthday Party, for example, was first staged in the UK in 1958 and was adapted for BBC radio in 1970, 1978, 1982 and 2002.For the 1970 production, Pinter collaborated with the producer Charles Lefeaux, adapting to radio the visual elements of the play, achieved in part by the creation of a narrator for the radio version. 20Pinter scripted his own adaptation of the play for cinema in 1975, and for BBC television in 1987 when he also appeared in it as an actor.Radio and TV shaped Pinter's reputation as much or more than the stage plays because more people encountered his work in those media.In tandem, as Ann C. Hall shows in her article on the writer's use of sound, Pinter's work across media allowed him to develop a nuanced appreciation of the aesthetic and affective possibilities of the acoustic, spatial and expressive capacities of radio, television and film.
At least since the late 1950s, Pinter's plays were recognized as socially engaged drama.The New Left writers of the theatre magazine Encore such as Irving Wardle 21 drew attention to the entrapment of his characters spatially and existentially, seeing this as a recognition of contemporary circumstances and the self-deceiving passivity that such material conditions produced.Pinter's language was seen as degraded and constraining, thus equally reflective of modernity, yet his idiomatic turns of phrase were capable of revealing flashes of comic resistance.His work contributed to a British theatre culture strongly influenced by continental European writing, alternative to the apparently more staid British tradition embodied by Terence Rattigan's or John Whiting's plays, and the major London productions just preceding The Birthday Party included Beckett's Waiting for Godot 22 in 1955 and Eugene Ionesco's The Lesson and The Bald Prima Donna in 1956, 23 each written by authors based in Paris.The other key comparator is John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, 24 first performed in 1956, which became the paradigm for gritty, 'kitchen sink' drama that featured young, frustrated and entrapped characters in down-at-heel domestic settings.The implicit model of influence was that Pinter absorbed existential features of contemporary culture and replayed them to his audiences, a familiar trope that was also used by other playwrights of the time, 25 especially Beckett with whom Pinter was often compared.Pinter and Beckett later became great friends after being introduced to one another by the French director Roger Blin, and they corresponded regularly, with Pinter sending Beckett scripts of new works.
Pinter and Beckett's aesthetic and professional overlaps did not end with theatre.Like Beckett, Pinter's ever-increasing familiarity with radio technology meant that his mid-and late-career work for radio often made use of the technology itself, the work drawing attention to the medium of its transmission in texts like Landscape (1968), a transmedial work first conceived for the stage that was rewritten with specific attention to radio's aesthetic possibilities, as demonstrated in Lucy Jeffery's article for this issue. 26Pinter claimed in an interview that it was Beckett's All That Fall (1957) which revealed to him 'a certain uniqueness about radio', one that revolved around the interplay of sound, silence and the imagination, an encounter which likely informed his writing of A Slight Ache. 27The BBC was also a persistent presence in Pinter and Beckett's relationship, especially through lifelong working friendships with BBC figures such as Barbara Bray, who shepherded Pinter's early works and offered critical feedback and encouragement throughout his career, and Martin Esslin, discussed further below.Both Bray and Esslin enjoyed social as well as professional relationships with Pinter and Beckett, sometimes together.Esslin also directed Pinter in broadcasts of Beckett's work for radio and adaptations of his prose. 28hough his radio career began with BBC Drama, television adaptations of Pinter's writing appeared on the commercial ITV channel, rather than BBC TV, until 1965.Val Gielgud, brother of the actor John Gielgud, was Head of Drama at the BBC from 1934 to 1963.He believed that broadcasting should present the classics every few years, and that new, experimental or foreign drama, like contemporary 'Absurd' drama by Pinter or Beckett, should be offered on BBC radio, rather than television, by the minority Third Programme.At lunch with his successor, Martin Esslin, Gielgud admitted, 'I hate Brecht, I hate Beckett, I hate Pinter.… That's why I've appointed you to deal with these people'. 29Esslin was a supporter of Pinter's work, and his papers include files of correspondence with Pinter, copies of his work and recordings of its radio and television broadcasts. 30One justification for the BBC's role as the premier national broadcaster with a guaranteed income from the licence fee that all households with a TV set were required to pay, and to some extent an excuse for the BBC's poor audience ratings, mentioned below, was that the BBC provided patronage for drama writers, supplied difficult and experimental dramatic work for a small but socially powerful niche audience, and protected the national heritage of theatrical excellence.Esslin and his generation supported Pinter's work, and Esslin published a monograph that used Pinter and Beckett as paradigmatic examples of a new kind of drama. 31This network, built around contemporary European playwrights, was an enabling matrix in Pinter's early career.
The companies holding ITV franchises had to demonstrate their success at fulfilling their public service remit in order to have their lucrative contracts renewed.Despite its primary remit to make money for its shareholders, requiring ITV companies to maximise audiences with popular programmes, the channel had the same legal duty as the BBC to cater to a range of different audiences, and to offer a range of types of programme that would provide news, current affairs, religious programmes, documentary and serious drama as well as entertainment.The Pilkington Report, a Government inquiry into ITV's performance over its first five years of existence, critiqued ITV in 1962 for the downmarket programming that it used to attract large audiences for its advertisers. 32The channel relied on imported American thrillers and Westerns, genres with plenty of action and fast-moving storylines, as well as British-made programmes in popular genres, like hospital drama, variety (vaudeville) spectaculars and game shows. 33Making serious drama and programmes about the arts was a means to counter these criticisms, enabling ITV to assert the channel's cultural credentials in competition with the BBC.Broadcasting cutting-edge contemporary drama was also a way for individual ITV franchise-holders to compete with each other on programme quality, and Pinter was among the dramatists that ITV tried to secure. 34Associated-Rediffusion (A-R), the ITV company that broadcast to the London TV region and contributed to the ITV network, was the first to make a Pinter drama.As Billington's biography tells, A-R's producer Peter Willes read The Birthday Party and invited Pinter to meet him, greeting him with the words: 'How dare you?' When Pinter looked puzzled by this remark, Willes explained: 'I've read your bloody play and I haven't had a wink of sleep for four nights'. 35The play is set in the living room of a boardinghouse in a small English seaside resort.Two unexpected visitors, Goldberg and McCann, come to the house and terrorize a long-term resident, Stanley, for whom an impromptu birthday party is held and a young woman, Lulu, is assaulted during a party game when all the lights go out.At the end of the play, for reasons that remain obscure, Goldberg and McCann take Stanley away.The play's dialogue appears demotic and desultory, but hints at powerful and violent emotions that threaten to break through its banal surface.
Joan Kemp-Welch directed the play, broadcast on national ITV on 22 March 1960 in the regular series Play of the Week.Far more people got to hear about Pinter on ITV television than saw his work at the theatre or heard it on BBC radio, in part because of its promotion: A-R took out an advertisement in the listings magazine TV Times featuring a large photograph in Expressionist style of a bespectacled man (Stanley) whose head is encircled by the large shadows of outreaching hands, as if to trap him in a dark room. 36Beneath the image the advertisement quoted reviews of the theatre production in upmarket newspapers, including Harold Hobson's in The Sunday Times that described Pinter as 'the most original, disturbing, and arresting talent in theatrical London'. 37Using theatre authors and adapting theatre texts provided readily available television material that had already been proven in either subsidized theatre, London's West End or touring repertory.This rationale underlay the television broadcast of both 'classics' from the British theatre canon (by Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde, for example) and also 'middlebrow' plays like murder mysteries.It was only later in the 1960s that the BBC forged a successful relationship with Pinter for screen versions of his plays, which appeared on the minority channel BBC2.For ITV to beat BBC TV partly though screening Pinter's work was politically advantageous for the commercial network.In 1961 the Television Playhouse series showed both Pinter's The Room and The Dumb Waiter, made by the ITV franchise holder for northern England, Granada.In the same year Kemp-Welch directed Pinter's The Collection for A-R.When she directed A-R's production of his play The Lover in 1963, Kemp-Welch's staging won the Prix Italia international prize for television drama.The BBC Head of Drama, the recently appointed Sydney Newman, sent a note to Kemp-Welch calling her 'a marvellous director' and playfully asking 'Do you want to join us?' 38 Pinter's A Night Out was screened by another ITV company, ABC, for Armchair Theatre in 1964, while Rediffusion produced an adaptation of The Caretaker in 1965, by which time Pinter's work had become relatively familiar to ITV's national audience.
The interchange between theatre and television broke open the boundaries between high and popular culture as well as media of production. 39The commercial ABC TV company, an ITV franchise holder now perhaps best known for the camp spy-adventure series The Avengers (1961-9), also made the arts series Tempo which profiled Pinter in 1965.The Present Stage, a series that used a theatre workshop format to explore how significant dramas of the period might be staged and to explain what they might mean, devoted two episodes to The Caretaker on ITV in 1966.It was broadcast on Sunday afternoons as an informal education programme, and its creator, John Kershaw, commented: 'I am hoping that this series will make modern drama interesting to people who perhaps never get the chance to go to the theatre'. 40BBC1 included an actors' workshop on the second act of The Birthday Party, led by Hugh Morrison, in a similar Sunday morning slot in 1969 for its series In Rehearsal.The Pinteresque may not have been 'popular' in the sense that it was universally approved, since Pinter himself was regarded as a controversial figure and his plays were considered 'difficult'.However, there was widespread recognition of his distinctive 'brand', and his representation of ordinary people and everyday speech was, despite the artifice with which Pinter turned these domestic stories into 'menace', an aspect of a cultural current that sought to connect with mass audiences and engage with contemporary experience.

Pinter across media
Transmediality was foregrounded when the BBC undertook to celebrate Pinter's work in different media, and the transformative possibilities of adapting his drama for TV, in The Tea Party (1965).The play was adapted from Pinter's own short story and directed by Charles Jarrott, in the BBC anthology The Largest Theatre in the World.Ten nations in the European Broadcasting Union each screened their own version of Pinter's script. 41The protagonist, Disson (Leo McKern), is anxious that his second wife is being seduced by his brother-in-law, that he is losing contact with his sons and succumbing to a sexual attraction for his secretary (played by Pinter's wife, Vivien Merchant).Disson's gradual mental deterioration is paralleled by failing eyesight that leads to him bandaging his eyes and collapsing.The drama uses optical point of view to align the viewer with Disson, for example when in a table tennis match Disson's ball suddenly becomes two balls as his eyes fail him.Pinter told the Paris Review, 'Tea Party, which I did for television, is actually a film, cinematic.I wrote it like that'. 42A mobile camera at floor level tracks Merchant's footsteps, and contrasts Disson's huge office with a long, narrow corridor featuring displays of his company's porcelain lavatories.Pinter was testing the affordances of television technologies and conventions, in dialogue with the technologies and conventions of cinema and theatre for rendering relationships between psychology and spatial perception.
The BBC also created a transmedial 1967 triple bill of Pinter plays for the Theatre 625 series on BBC2.The first was A Slight Ache, detailed above.A Night Out had been broadcast on BBC radio in 1960 and also screened that year by ITV in its Armchair Theatre (1956-74) anthology series of one-off plays, directed by Phillip Saville, 43 with Pinter himself acting one of the lead roles, before being directed by Christopher Morahan for television.The third play in the triple bill was The Basement, an original drama directed by Charles Jarrott, with Pinter playing one of the three protagonists.BBC TV was coming rather late to the party, but by the mid-1960s Pinter was among a group of major new theatre writers that the BBC was keen to showcase on television, though this was not because his dramas attracted particularly appreciative audiences.The BBC Audience Research Report on A Slight Ache had an Appreciation Index (a percentage score recording viewers' approval or dislike of programmes) of 43 in contrast to Theatre 625's average of 66. 44 Similarly, Reports on the Theatre 625 trilogy gave the plays Appreciation Indices of 43, 54 and 39 respectively.The feedback recorded from viewers often described Pinter's plays as puzzling and sometimes annoying, though a minority regarded them as absorbing despite being challenging. 45inter featured often on BBC2 arts programmes like Late Night Line-Up  46 He had previously written the anti-nuclear sketch 'Precisely', screened by Newsnight (BBC2, 15 December 1983), had argued for the political nature of his plays, detailing the powerlessness of the individual, in BBC1's Omnibus profile (1988), and explicitly opposed the Balkan conflict in Counterblast (1999) and the Iraq war in Hardtalk (2004).Pinter's later interest in television as a medium for political activity is documented in this special issue in Ian Greaves' edited interview with the Arena production team who collaborated with the writer for its Harold Pinter profile (2002).Augmented by Greaves' commentary, this contribution demonstrates Pinter's awareness of television's centrality to cultural life and the specific dynamics of the documentary genre.
Television borrows from other arts at the same time as it establishes its own properties and what is proper to it. 47The unquestioned acceptance of the concept of Public Service Broadcasting among broadcasters, and the creative workers who interacted with them, meant that television producers took for granted that there were contemporary dramatic works that ought to be made available by being televised. 48The medial identity of television closely followed that of radio as a centre-periphery form of broadcasting, with a division between the professional elites who managed the service versus the audience receiving it.The rise of radio in Britain in the 1930s and then television in the 1950s created what Paddy Scannell describes as a 'new kind of public', on whose behalf 'the broadcasters asserted a right of access to a wide range of political, cultural, sporting, religious, ceremonial and entertainment resources which, perforce, had hitherto been accessible only to small, self-selecting, and more or less privileged publics'. 49Broadcasters made judgements of taste and quality that led to the creation of informal networks linking television producers with dramatists, producers, directors and venues.
Pinter's access to broadcast distribution of his work was a precondition for finding a public and establishing a reputation, both nationally and internationally. 50lthough the Third Programme had tiny audiences ever since its launch in 1946, it had a disproportionately important role in British culture because of its support for contemporary writers like Pinter. 51As well as adapting stage plays and broadcasting readings of print literature, the Third Programme's producers commissioned new work and sought out emerging talent, and Pinter began to achieve inclusion in an elite culture with international reach. 52He became associated with networks of publishers, radio and television producers and theatre directors in a similar way to his friend Beckett, and a key means of acquiring international reach of a similar level was his relationship with Barney Rosset, 53 the New York publisher behind Grove Press and the journal Evergreen Review which distributed avant-garde drama scripts and fiction by Beckett, Pinter and other European writers in the USA.In the UK, publishers like Methuen, Faber and Penguin brought out paperback editions of dramas thought to be landmarks of British theatre, and Samuel French published acting scripts. 54Television and radio productions were part of a larger history of Pinter's popularization through plays that were easily obtainable, had made a public impact through reviews in newspapers and were available for production by amateur theatre groups.
Accessibility is also crucial to an author's international reputation, a process which relies on national structures of culture making.Taking the specific example of Polish radio and television history for this special issue, Łukasz Borowiec traces how adaptations of Pinter's work in Poland map onto the nation's broader political and cultural upheavals during the second half of the twentieth century, revealing too the economic and institutional networks through which the arts in Poland functioned.Due to inconsistent translations and publications of Anglophone writing in Poland, television and radio offered the most direct access for the Polish public to Pinter's work, and the processes of production and dissemination during the period Borowiec describes show the degree to which cultural production and cultural access depend on and express political circumstances.
Pinter's experience of theatre and interest in the medium's relationship to television led to dramas for television that thematised and deconstructed theatricality. 55In The Basement, for example, a love triangle with one female and two male characters who compete with and seduce each other, the setting of a basement flat changes without warning from one shot another, by innovative use of filmed sequences of both interior and exterior spaces inserted into the main action.Although the play takes place in a set constructed in the television studio, and camera moves are in themselves self-effacing, the unannounced oddities of spatial representation make it impossible that what the viewer sees is like a relay of a theatre performance.The project was structured like a cinema film, with the kind of 'opening-out' that, at the time, was regarded as a property of cinema rather than either television or television adaptation of theatre.Such a formal style contrasted with contemporaneous dramas, which were shot as-if live in the studio in long tranches of dialogue. 56That format conduced to spatio-temporal continuity, as in theatre.The Basement uncannily refuses this, and is a wry meditation on how theatre and television are different as well as similar.In Pinter's Landscape, written for radio in 1968 and broadcast on television in 1983, then revived for BBC2's Performance strand in 1995 with Pinter directing, the two characters' verbal interactions are foregrounded by the absence of any physical movement, but neither can the expression by the man and woman be called dialogue since they seem oblivious to each other.The repudiation of theatricality that is entailed in the quest for medium specificity opens the way for work that self-consciously deconstructs links between media.
Pinter's dramatic output is frequently periodized thematically, and the television screenings of his work in the 1960s are relatively contemporaneous with their theatre premieres, or are of plays written specially for the television medium.So, they exhibit a relatively consistent identity as 'comedies of menace', expressing the dynamics of interpersonal power relations within the restricted space of domestic rooms by means of elliptical language and pauses in conversation that conduce to feelings of tension and threat.Pinter's plays of the 1970s onwards, while retaining some of this characteristic 'Pinteresque' verbal sparring or non-communication, have been called 'memory plays' in that they concern the relationship between a past and the present, and the impact of the former on the latter.In Pinter's radio work too, the early A Slight Ache focuses on the power dynamic of Edward, Flor and the silent match seller, while 1968s Landscape features Beth and Duff who reminisce about a romantic past without directly interacting with one another.Across Pinter's output, many of the plays feature two male characters and one female, and centre on the struggle of characters for self-realisation in the context of sexual competition and betrayal. 57However, as Pinter's reputation grew and his dramas were repeated and remade in various contexts through the 1970s and into the 2000s, these shifts in theme and form become much less clear.In 1991, for the BBC's Performance series that revived theatre dramas shot in the TV studio, Simon Curtis directed Old Times, returning to a mode of production that had waned three decades earlier, with a play first broadcast in 1975.The Arena: Harold Pinter four-hour documentary and retrospective for BBC Four in 2002 includes Pinter performing in his own play One for the Road, the premiere of his new play Celebration, and numerous extracts from previous broadcasts of his drama.Arena presented revivals of plays from across his career, including in 2002 his first play The Room of 1956.The canonization of Pinter also meant a confusion of chronologies and of his work's implicit teleological development.
The television studio as a production space shifted in significance in the mid-1960s, and became associated pejoratively with the linguistic, verbal emphasis of scripted performance rather than with physical action in exterior space. 58This shift lent increasing prominence to social realist dramas shot on location, most obviously in the BBC's Wednesday Play series (1964-70) and subsequent drama strands like Play for Today (1970-84). 59Pinter's work did not appear in these contexts, but instead in schedule slots that befitted plays that exploited the intimacy of the studio and showcased acted performance.It was TV drama that Raymond Williams described as 'the ultimate realisation of the original naturalist convention: the drama of the small enclosed room, in which a few characters lived out their private experience of an unseen public world'. 60Pinter's plays thus looked relatively conventional, potentially coming in for criticism from forward-looking commentators like W. Stephen Gilbert, who critiqued BBC television drama for being 'entrenched in the tradition of naturalism'. 61Their apparent conventionalism, on the other hand, made Pinter's plays more accessible to audiences, so that they sat between formally experimental work and the comfortingly familiar series and serial forms that viewers said in audience feedback that they enjoyed. 62Pinter's work shared its tropes with popular television drama, exemplified by a 1970 review of a new series of the BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son (1962-5, 1970-4) which Raymond Williams placed in 'a very old pattern in the drama of the last 100 years.This is the pattern of men trapped in rooms, working out the general experience of being cheated and frustrated, on the most immediately available target: the others inside the cage'. 63He was evidently thinking of Pinter's work as the point of comparison.
The leading voice defending linguistically complex studio production technique as a medium-specific approach was the director Don Taylor: 'True television drama has a quite different aesthetic from film-making.It tolerates, in fact it relishes imaginative, argumentative and even poetic writing in a way the film camera does not'. 64For Taylor, television excelled at dialogue, performed in settings built for the play in the studio.The result would be an imaginative fictional world in which all of the aesthetic elements of the drama could be harmonious and (1983) was directed by David Jones, with whom Pinter also worked on the BBC film Langrishe, Go Down (1978) and the film version of The Trial.As in television and radio, Pinter developed lasting working relationships with directors and actors.His adaptation of Robert Maugham's 1948 novella The Servant in 1963 starred Dirk Bogarde with Joseph Losey as director, and the three were reunited in 1968 for Pinter's adaptation of Nicholas Mosley's Accident (1965), and Pinter and Losey again for The Go-Between (1971).These films were significant for Losey, marking the high-point of his career as part of the British film avant-garde, and for Bogarde who was at the time attempting to shed the leading-man persona he had developed under contract with the Rank Organisation, particularly through the comedic Doctor film franchise.The Servant appeared in the same year as Bogarde's last Doctor film, Doctor in Distress, marking his transition from box-office acclaim to recognition through high-profile awards, a process started by Victim in 1961.Bogarde won the BAFTA for Best Actor in a Leading Role for The Servant.Meanwhile, Doctor in Distress was one of the biggest box office successes of 1963, and a survey of film in 1963 made special note of his 'staying power'; he had appeared 'in the list of favourite [actors] every year since 1953'. 71inter's knowledge and appreciation of film grew in part through the relationships he cultivated with figures in the film industry.His correspondence with Ted Gilling, known for his contributions to Sight and Sound, for example, shows an engaged dialogue over the minutiae of film.Gilling was particularly enthused about Pinter's adaptation of The Last Tycoon, 72 and praised Pinter's adaption of Butley, noting that the film perspective Pinter adopted as director gave greater nuance to Alan Bates' performance than on the stage.Gilling was also adamant that Pinter should have given more energy to publishing his Proust screenplay, a sentiment also conveyed by Pinter's fellow screenwriter Christopher Hampton who commended Pinter for his adaptation of the gargantuan novel. 73s an actor, Pinter made cameos in four films for which he wrote the screenplays -The Caretaker (1960); The Servant (1964); Accident (1967); and Turtle Diary (1985)and played Barry Shannon in his BBC film adaptation of Langrishe, Go Down (1978).He also appeared in the political spoof The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970) as Steven Hench, in Clive Donner's Rogue Male (1976) in the role of Saul Abrahams, the Jewish lawyer and friend of Peter O'Toole's Sir Richard Hunter, as the criminal Sam Ross in Mojo (1997), Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park (1999) and Uncle Benny in The Tailor of Panama (2001).Though infrequent, Pinter's more substantial film roles make use of his experience as a performer on stage and in television.As Richard Hewett shows in the present issue, Pinter combines controlled and precise physical acting with an awareness of the necessities of shot-to-shot continuity on single-camera productions.In comparing and documenting Pinter's work in front of the camera for film and television, Hewett demonstrates how Pinter adapted his performance techniques to the technical requirements of different production contexts.
What is striking in Pinter's catalogue of screenplay credits is the matter of genre, and two close studies of Pinter's film writing in this special issue intervene in the relative lack of scholarship devoted to Pinter's screen work.Jonathan Bignell's and Laurel Forster's articles reveal how Pinter was keenly sensitive to the shape and boundaries of the spy film genre as both an economic and cultural force.Bignell explores Pinter's adaptation of Elleston Trevor's novel The Berlin Memorandum (1965) 74 into The Quiller Memorandum (1966), while Forster looks to Pinter's 1989 adaptation of Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day (1948).Pinter's comfort with the spy genre is easy to see.It is reliant on knowledge and the passing of information, the said and the unsaid, the implied and the concealed.Power relations can be established by a look or a gesture; life and death rest on a single word or nod.Bignell and Forster reveal two key aspects of Pinter's screenwriting career: the cultural cachet of his name as a screenwriter, and his abilities as a reader and adaptor of texts.Pinter chose his screenwriting projects based on interest and suitability, considering the work carefully.As Isabelle Roblin writes, Pinter enjoyed a 'somewhat privileged position' as a scriptwriter because 'he did not depend on screenwriting for a living', 75 though he commanded increasingly high fees for his work. 76As in his other work, Pinter developed a strong-willed working method for adaption, in the firm belief that he was 'producing art, not the mere skeleton for technological exploitation', 77 that his screenplays are 'acts of the imagination', not just transcriptions of the text. 78Pinter's decision in 2000 to publish his screenplay adaptations with Faber reveals that, as Roblin observes, he saw them as 'an integral and worthy part of his own work as an author'. 79Critical analysis of his film work is nascent, and the case studies examined in this special issue show the potentiality of studying Pinter as a significant figure in film making.Analysing Pinter's career across radio, TV plays and films is an opportunity to trace connections across and between media, and assess how ideas, people and aesthetic forms are incorporated, shared, transformed or repudiated.This article has introduced the special issue with a brief account of some of those entangled histories, to suggest that such work is an opportunity for a deconstructive understanding of medium specificity via attention to transmediality.It demonstrates that respect needs to be paid to the contingent specificity of historical events, because of the long duration of Pinter's career and its changing character, and also to how we make research connections.These two factors limit the potentially unbounded and entangling connectedness that transmediality implies.
(1964-72) and Arena (1975-) talking about his own work and commenting on culture and politics.Dramatic writing and arts comment were combined in the unusual format of Pinter People, five animated sketches first created in 1969 which were also compiled for BBC2 in 1970 by the Canadian filmmaker Gerard Potterton.An interview with Pinter at home was interspersed with footage of people interacting in London's caf es, pubs and the riverbank, and Pinter's sketches The Last to Go, Trouble in the Works, The Black and White, Request Stop and The Applicant were voiced by actors including Merchant and Pinter himself.Such comic shorts were also performed on television variety shows in the 1960s and 1970s.Pinter became a well-known and controversial media figure, exemplified by the Channel 4 screening of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech Art, Truth & Politics in 2005.