![]() ![]() There are of course worthy new plays and series that deal with chosen issues James Graham’s Brexit : The Uncivil War. At the current time of writing I cannot think or indeed cite one original drama that successfully honours that singular aim. That he never provided easy answers or solutions only enforced the crucial fact that art, if it has any active or positive use at all, is, and can only be concerned with defining the questions that, if they do nothing else, both allow for, and all too often provide the context within which humanity currently defines its strengths and limitations. ![]() Like all great art, Pinter worked for the why as opposed to the what. As new works appeared throughout the 1960s, the plays and poems always seemed more in thrall to the impulse behind the choices and decisions we find ourselves confronted with, than they were with the result. His later work as an independent political activist and speaker rippled and coursed its way through the chemical strains of his previous writing, like a photograph emerging from developing fluid, from within those first pieces, attaining both a sharpness and vibrancy in practise and reflection. His teenage stance of conscientious objection in light of the developing cold war proved otherwise, but this realisation took some years to achieve focus in the plays themselves. Unlike the forementioned writers, Pinter’s early work was never directly concerned with the immediate needs of the society and environment which housed him. Both he and a surrounding coterie of groundbreaking contemporaries, including Dennis Potter, David Mercer, John Hopkins, Troy Kennedy Martin and the formative works of playwrights such as Peter Nichols and Simon Gray, mastered a range of still developing techniques to make active hand-grenades of meaning and expression from a new form, which they then cast through the electrical current, straight into the still pulsating hearts of the attendant audience. The charge and power necessary to engender the frame has been channelled through it, in order to rearrange and to startle our view.īorn in 1930, Harold Pinter was a member of the last generation to grow up without television as part of their consciousness, or everyday environment. This newly released collection of productions birthed in the last century, ably transcend their often crude technical aspects to showcase a clarity of practise and intention that will go on to instruct anyone interested in understanding the potentials of dramatic expression. The recent DVD Box set release from the BFI, PINTER AT THE BBC is a status shattering revival of both a time and practise when television drama in this country was capable of both education in terms of style and meaning elucidation in relation to what it is possible to achieve in the television play format and cultural advancement itself, in regards to both form, atmosphere and approach. ![]() (Disc 1 extra: Pinter at the BBC BFI/ICA)Īt a time when British Television seems to be going through either a tastelessly infused adolescence or an increasingly befuddled senility, in which easy resolution or a sense of unearned ambiguity is key to unlocking a door that only leads to the financial requirements of sequelisation, the notion of both an authoritative and artful dramatic voice is – regardless of the chosen form of which I speak – more novel than ever. ![]() Harold Pinter in conversation with Benedict Nightingale Television, Theatre, and the uses of Resonance and Frequency in the work of Harold Pinter ![]()
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