Pinter as Performer

In addition to his distinguished writing career, Harold Pinter also worked successfully for many decades as an actor, making numerous, albeit intermittent, appearances on television, on stage and in film. Pinter’s acting life spanned the television eras I have identified as studio realism and location realism (2017). However, unlike many of his contemporaries, his screen performances do not represent a straightforward linear development from the scaled down, stage-derived codes of multi-camera studio to the less projected style of single camera film. In contrast, Pinter drew upon a variety of styles at each stage of his performing career. This article draws upon four case studies to examine his screen performances, divided into two pairs. The first examines his work for multi-camera studio television, and the second for single camera film. The multi-camera case studies include an early supporting role as Seeley in his own Armchair Theatre entry, ‘A Night Out’, alongside the BBC’s 1987 adaptation of ‘The Birthday Party’, in which Pinter plays Nat Goldberg. The single camera pairing comprises Pinter’s cameo as lawyer Saul Abrahams in the 1976 television movie Rogue Male, and his memorable appearance as the Director in David Mamet’s 2000 short film Catastrophe.

In addition to examining the range of naturalistic and non-naturalistic techniques Pinter employed over his distinguished – yet comparatively little heralded – acting career, this article will also consider to what extent Pinter was ‘performing’ in terms of his public persona, taking as its model his 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature lecture, ‘Art, Truth and Politics’.