Working with Pinter

This quietly crafted revelation of Harold Pinter unfolds steadily to satisfying and sometimes profound effect. Pieces of master-class workshop with the playwright alternate with on-set interview and reminiscence and are complemented by rejoinder and commentary by longtime friend and collaborator Henry Woolf. The rotating motif succeeds in producing a four-dimensional color portrait.

Pinter was known for his political passions, and the political dimensionality of the man is perhaps the most brilliantly realized aspect of this working portrait of the playwright. From a snapshot of the young Pinter cutting his teeth as a conscientious objector in postwar England, we see Pinter, on set, reveal himself as a "contester": how he experiences his plays as contests between the playwright (and by extension the actors) and the audience. Similarly he describes the interplay between his characters in terms suggesting contest, the contesting of id-entities. The portrait comes full circle as we behold the depth of his feelings in the historical moment of 2007: contesting the powers that be.

Several other facets of Pinter are also neatly revealed. For example his "relish" of acting--a word he uses to expose the libidinous streams he channeled, both as actor and playwright. Pinter as stickler for the particularities of the texts of his plays: forty, fifty years later he knows the precise wording of seemingly every line, and he's not shy about returning to the text with workshop actors, turning the text on point to unfold the experience for the actor.

Henry Woolf comes across as something of a soul mate (I initially wondered if Pinter might have been gay); his offerings are an excellent match for Pinter's and progressively add a kind of relish to the whole. As for the cuts of acting-workshop dialogue (several different pairs of actors appear through the course of the BBC video), they give full flavor to Pinter's early oeuvre.