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The Dwarfs | One
for the Road | Sketches | The Room | Celebration
The Dwarfs
BBC Four: Thursday 7 November 10pm-11.40pm
A screen premiere adapted from
Harold Pinter's only novel. The Dwarfs, written before Pinter discovered
his voice as a playwright, was the starting point for this intense
study of a fracturing friendship. Len, Pete and Mark are three friends
who subject each other to abuse and advice as Len's paranoia spirals
into insanity. He imagines a party of dwarfs hovering on the edge
of his existence, providing the play with its most disturbing and
most humorous traits. The chemistry of the three men precipitates
Len's collapse by forcing him to expose his own self-delusion. In
the move from novel to play Pinter became preoccupied with these
different demons, and it was here that he found his own dwarfs,
that would lead him from unpublished novelist to cherished pioneer.
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One for the Road
BBC Two: Saturday 26 October 11.30pm-midnight;
rpt BBC Four: Wednesday 30 October 11.05pm-11.35pm
Pinter gives a devastating performance in last year's revival of
his biting drama by the Gate Theatre, Dublin. In the 1980s Pinter the political playwright was
unveiled in all his savagery. This, perhaps the most fearsome half-hour
of his whole career, is set in a police state where a torturer interrogates
his victims, abusing authority and desperately craving acceptance
by hook or by crook. Pinter
creates a monstrous main figure whose exhibition of brutality, self-loathing
and self-obsession do all the play's work for us. But what One for
the Road lacks in dramatic conflict it compensates for with prickly
silence, bleak reflection and traumatic confession.
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Sketches
BBC Four: Saturday 26 October 10.05pm-10.35pn; rpt Wednesday 30 October 10.45pm-11.15pm
Sketches are quintessentially Pinter; acutely observed fragments of encounters in the all-night cafe, the newstand or anywhere in Pinter's landscape. In 1969, Canadian filmmaker Gerald Potterton animated a number of sketches with the voices of leading British actors at the time, including Pinter himself. Sketches combined those with the recent production at the National Theatre, which included Press Conference, a new piece which was Pinter's most recent performance in the theatre.
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The Room
BBC Four: Tuesday 5 November 10pm-10.55pm
The Almeida's revival of Pinter's first play stars Henry Woolf who
was also in the original 1957 production at Bristol University.
Pinter suggested an idea for a play to a friend who loved it, but
wanted a script within a week. Pinter said, "forget it"
and then went home and wrote The Room in four days. Bert Hudd drives
a truck, Rose worries. On the night in question, she feeds her husband
and sends him off to work only to be visited by a sinister couple,
a blind man with a message for her, and some extraordinarily gripping
moments in an essentially banal situation.
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Celebration
BBC Four: Friday 8 November 10pm-10.45pm
Written by Pinter on the occasion of his 70th birthday and performed at the Almeida Theatre with The Room, at first
glance Celebration appears to be just that. Humour abounds, albeit
of a rather spiteful kind, over two tables at a plush restaurant.
One is occupied by a bank manager and his wife, the other by two
sets of shady in-laws celebrating an anniversary. The husbands commit
the crimes; the molls ask few questions and enjoy the rewards. But
after the verbal sparing has worked its spell on us, a conventional
play darts off into craziness. The intrusion of the restaurant owner
and the waiter shifts the play's satire from sardonic humour to
surreal attack, Pinter neatly demonstrating that there are at least
two ways to skin this particular rabbit, and that for an old dog
he's still
learning new tricks. Pinter directs Keith Allen, Lindsay Duncan,
Steven Pacey and Andy de la Tour.
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Pinter
at the BBC homepage
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