“This is it, sort it out yourself,” was one of the maxims governing the playwriting of Harold Pinter. A provocative new voice when he emerged on London’s stages as the 1960s began, Pinter “seemed to be making up the modern style” as he went along, as theater historians Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright once wrote.
As early as 1962 Pinter developed a lucrative parallel career in screenwriting, the subject of Steven H. Gale’s book Sharp Cuts: Harold Pinter’s Screenplays and the Artistic Process, recently republished in paperback by University Press of Kentucky. The title is apt: Pinter’s dialogue can be knife sharp and drive ordinary speech as hard and fast as David Mamet, transforming ordinary language into something strange in the mouths of actors.
As a screenwriter Pinter seldom topped the almost Kafkaesque disorientation of The Birthday Party (1968), directed by newcomer William Friedkin. But he is best known for his screen adaptations of other writers, especially The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) and The Handmaid’s Tale (1990). Gale ascribes the best work by directors Joseph Losey (The Accident) and Michael Anderson (The Quiller Memorandum) to Pinter’s influence.
With a European art house rather than a Hollywood sensibility, Pinter is generally less concerned with narrative storytelling than “character delineation through mood at the expense of action.” Gale adds that as in his stage plays, Pinter’s screenplays “withhold enough information so that the meaning of the details is obscured until the moment he wants to reveal it.”
