#pinter proust

[louk419]

OTD in 2014 Richard took part in a Pinter/Proust dramatic reading at the 92nd St Y in NYC. Afterwards he greeted fans in the lobby. Clip of his performance as Swann on YT here: https://tinyurl.com/p2rp6bdr

[justforbooks]

The American No by Rupert Everett

The actor, writer and director mines his own backlog of unmade projects to create an exhilarating collection

Rupert Everett prefaces his suite of short stories with an account of the showbiz ruse that provides the title, a grim little routine whereby American film producers intoxicate a would-be screenwriter into feeling that a deal has been done, only to then forget them entirely. Will Everett’s readers offer up the English equivalent, murmuring “Darling, you were marvellous” before moving swiftly on? Well, the collection certainly delivers what Everett’s fans will be hoping for: quality time in his inimitable company. But it also delivers much more. Sometimes, it is simply the energy and poise of the prose that arrest one’s attention; often, it is Everett’s combination of studied carnality with an outlandish gift for invention. This is a storyteller unafraid to spike his black comedy with sudden and strongly brewed emotion – and vice versa.

In his frequent interjections, Everett is disarmingly frank about these stories’ origins. In 20 years of making pitches to TV and film producers, only one project of his has ever landed. This was his directorial debut, The Happy Prince, a meditation on Oscar Wilde’s fall from grace which got considerably more of Wilde’s rage and sorrow on to the screen than many more respectable versions (elements of the film are reworked in the second of these stories). But that was back in 2018, and these days, Everett’s phone isn’t ringing. A rain swept encounter with a former Soho contact sparks the idea that he could usefully bring some of his rejected ideas into a new kind of life. The result is intriguing, not least because these vivid little adventures aren’t really short stories at all; they are scenes from unmade films, reimagined as prose.

In the course of a career that started at the Glasgow Citizens theatre company and took him via the West End to Hollywood and beyond, Everett has been by turns an actor, a writer and a director. Here, he draws on all those different experiences. Whatever the setting, the dialogue is always sharp and telling. Sometimes the author plays himself; required to transform, he inhabits even the strangest of his fictional alter egos with assurance. The settings are realised with distinctively cinematic flair; they range from the backstreets of Wilde’s Paris to their Aids-era equivalents, from a ruined Anglo-Irish mansion to a heat-becalmed Suez canal. Their genres vary as much as the settings: one piece dishes the dirt on the underbelly of 1980s Hollywood with made-for-TV tastelessness; another documents a failed shipboard romance as the very best kind of costume drama, clear-eyed and memorable. Everett makes especially skilful use of cinema’s easy ability to filter its stories through screens of memory and flashback; only on rereading the collection do you notice that the intensity and colour of the storytelling almost always spring from the fact that everything is being played out in someone’s dreams, or memories or nightmares.

This becomes most explicit in the last story, which drops all pretence of transforming its material into short-form prose and is laid out as an actual film script. This piece, fascinatingly, is made out of just one episode’s worth of material intended for a TV series based on Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Instead of going for the elegant restraint of Harold Pinter’s version (also unproduced), this filleting and re-ordering of the granddaddy of all flashback narratives is lyrical and violent, unafraid of dwelling on Proust’s lust and cruelty as the dying author ransacks his memories for meaning. Episodes from Proust’s own life are woven into those of his novel, and the final sequences especially restore some much-needed sexual explicitness to this darkest of autofictions.

Individually, the stories are exhilarating; together, they add up to an intriguing self-portrait of an artist at work, presenting us with the multiple facets of an undaunted imagination, recut, repolished and ready to shine in the dark.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[meandrichard]

À la recherche du temps perdu -- not

[Not about PINTER/Proust. LOL. Assumes awareness of this article. I have not watched the Obsession trailer — yet. I watched the short preview, saw Armitage’s thumb on someone’s throat, and was — dare I say it — turned OFF. And slightly surprised about it.] On Friday, an Armitage friend — ok, let’s be honest, I’ve known her thirteen years, I’ve only met her once, but we’ve had enough frank…

[momacist]

I've experienced new film genres and watched things I'd never think to watch by looking through an actor's filmography. David Tennent, Bill Pullman, Olivia Coleman, Sarah Smart (Oh my gosh gender bent Wuthering Heights!), Nicola Walker, Richard Armitage (I even drove 5 hours to New York and back in a day to see him in a read through of Pinter on Proust). I cannot wait to see what Jonathan Bailey does next. Fellow Travelers had me in tears (I had a friend with a quilt on the Mall), Bridgerton is fluffy fun, and Wicked BLEW. MY. MIND. What next, good sir? What next?

JONATHAN BAILEY, “dancing through life”

[heyyjudetheobscure]

very fun that one of the most prevalent threads of the original series that Pinter's "The Proust Screenplay" picks up and runs with is, "THE LESBIANS ARE THWARTING ME"

[mezzmerizedbyrichard]

Raiding my gif folder 21/?

↪ Richard + stage

Kenneth Love,Love,Love (2016), John Proctor The Crucible (2014), Cats (1994), Macbeth (Royal Shakespeare Company), Dr Mikhail Astrov Uncle Vanya (2020), Swann Pinter Proust (2014)

(Reblogging again because I found another Astrov gif)

[texaschainsawmascara]

Fairytale (Let Me Live My Life This Way) - Rebecca Ferguson / Dreams - Cassie Steele / The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. I: “March, 1933” / Trapeze, Fire, Incest From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin / The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1944–1947 / Linotte; The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin: 1914-1920 / The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934 / Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit / The Virgin Suicides / Loss of Breath - Edgar Allen Poe / Dancing - Mellow Fellow / unknown / The Strangest Dream - Harshita Jhawar / Alex Turner / Never Too Late - Three Days Grace / La Collectionneuse / Daydreaming - Paramore / Windblown World - Jack Kerouac / Madness: A Bipolar Life - Marya Hornbacher / A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance - Hanif Abdurraqib / Poems 1962-2012 - Louise Glück / The Pages of Day and Night - Adonis, trans. Samuel Hazo / 4.48 Psychosis - Sarah Kane / Demian - Hermann Hesse / The Poems of Octavio Paz; “The Prisoner”, Octavio Paz, trans. Eliot Weinberger / unknown / The Hour of the Star - Clarice Lispector / Maggie Stiefvater / Fyodor Dostoyevsky / Haruki Murakami / V.E. Schwab / The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa / Remembrance of Things Past Vol. 1 - Marcel Proust / A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams / 2046 / Hausu (House) (1977) / La fille prodigue (The Prodigal Daughter) / Love and Space Dust - David Jones / 37°2 le matin (Betty Blue) / Unknown / Sputnik Sweetheart - Haruki Murakami / Complete Works, a letter to Violet Dickinson - Virginia Woolf / Back In Town - Florence + The Machine / Unknown / The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934 / Heavy - The Marías / The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy / Complete Poems, 1904-1962 - E.E. Cummings / Complete Works, Vol. 1: “The Birthday Party” - Harold Pinter / Clarice Lispector / N.M. Sanchez / Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) / please put me in a medically induced coma - carolesdaughter

[alioshakaramazov]

the list:

Alma Mahler Werfel: Diaries 1898-1902 (tr. Antony Beaumont)

Wallace Stegner. The Spectator Bird

Robert Johnson. Inner Work

Harold Pinter. Caretaker

Declan Donnellan. The Actor and the Target

Jon Kabat-Zinn. Wherever You Go There You Are

T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets

Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1892-1910

Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time vol. II

James Salter. Light Years

Karl Ove Knausgaard. My Struggle, Book 1

jeremy bringing books to his silly gq video is absolutely SENDING me. he is a king i think.

[chicago-geniza]

Jelonka was also way too classy for her milieu, fwiw. In 1972 Erwin Axer staged a production of Pinter's Old Times po polsku & almost all the contemporary critics were like "a bloo bloo, psychoanalysis" or "hurr hurr, lesbians" & Jelonka did a wonderfully thoughtful & sensitive reading that compares the text & the actors' performance "method" to Proust's In Search of Lost Time re: memory as a "revenant," appearing in the present as an affective force in gesture and spontaneous, involuntary sensory associations that make the past materialize into the moment at hand, & she very correctly gestures at how these embodied memories can also become the foundation FOR a kind of method acting. Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't Pinter asked to work on a film script for Swann's Way at the time he was writing this? Jelonka's right!

[insanityclause]

In the 1960s, British playwright Harold Pinter (1930-2008), who went on to earn a Nobel Prize, was married to actress Vivien Merchant but having a seven-year fling with BBC-TV personality Joan Bakewell. This personal experience was one of several important influences on his 1978 drama about marital infidelity, Betrayal, now receiving its fourth (and, possibly, best) Broadway production since 1980. I recall being unimpressed by that mostly lauded 1980 staging, largely because I considered its three usually outstanding American stars, Roy Scheider as Robert, Blythe Danner as Emma, and Raul Julia as Jerry, to be unconvincing as highly-educated Brits. I missed the 2000 revival, starring Liev Schreiber, Juliette Binoche, and John Slattery, as Robert, Emma, and Jerry. None was English, but, in 2013, when the potentially awesome all-British cast of Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, and Rafe Spall played the the same roles, my response (unlike that of most viewers) was only ho-hum. For the current, limited-run, revival at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, which originated earlier this year during London’s Pinter at the Pinter season, the biggest name among the English leads is Tom Hiddleston (Loki in the Avengers movies), who plays Robert. This is not to say his bright costars, Zawe Ashton (Velvet Buzzsaw) as Emma and Charlie Cox (Philip, Duke of Crowborough on “Downton Abbey”) is Jerry, are in any way diminished by his charismatic presence. They play their roles with the diamond-cutting precision of master jewelers.

But that is still not enough to convince me that Betrayal is more substance than style. In fact, the brilliance of the acting here in Jamie Lloyd’s unconventionally minimalist, finely tuned staging only serves to emphasize the play’s technical glitter over its emotional heartbeat. In the interest of brevity, allow me to adapt the capsule summary of the plot from my review of the 2013 production. It tells the story of how, in 1968, Jerry, a literary agent (Pinter’s avatar), a married man and father, falls for and begins his affair with Emma. She is the gallery-owning wife of Robert, a publisher who is Jerry’s closest friend (his best man, in fact). The affair lasts seven years and ends in 1975. For much of the time, the lovers conduct their clandestine romance in a rented flat. Meanwhile, Robert begins his own affair, as does Jerry’s wife, Judith. A coda, set in 1977, two years after the affair ends, brings the former lovers together at a pub, and Emma reveals that she is now involved with another writer, one of Jerry’s clients whose publisher is Robert.

What makes this otherwise straightforward tale of adulterous love, male bonding and deception, and scratched memories (à la Proust) intriguing is its backward chronology, with the 1977 post-affair coda actually being the first scene, and with the play then proceeding to eight scenes set, respectively, in 1975, 1974, 1973, 1971, and 1968 (1977 has two scenes and 1973 has 3).

And what makes this production intriguing is its abandonment of realistic scenery in favor of an essentially bare stage, designed by Soutra Gilmour, using only a couple of chairs, and very few other props. Instead of recognizable locales, we see a low, beige, color-textured wall running straight across the upstage area beneath a black ceiling in which multiple, embedded lighting strips run parallel to the wings. Jon Clark’s exceptional lighting paints the background with a mood-enhancing palette, casting the actors’ razor-sharp silhouettes on the wall, as well as varying the spatial feeling with shuttering effects.

In line with this spare, visual restraint are both Pinter’s remarkably polite, reticent, outburst-free script and the actors themselves, each model-slender, wearing the same clothing throughout, their every movement calibrated for effect. Lloyd creates an almost Becketian world in which each gesture, twist of the leg, or crook of the neck--even the way Robert eats a meal--seems choreographed for imagistic impact, almost as if you could take a picture of any moment and get a Vogue-worthy shot. Ashton’s Emma seems especially prone to standing in ways that seem more poses than positions. Souter’s perfectly-tailored costumes further enhance the physical attractiveness, Robert’s black garb balanced by Jerry’s grayish jacket, with the principal source of color being Emma, the triangle’s pulse, perpetually barefooted in an elegant, high-shouldered, blue, silk blouse and slightly bell-bottomed jeans. Duologues are performed, often with those involved sitting in spindle-backed wooden chairs as the third member of the trio remains upstage, near the wall, present but not present, a constant reminder of his or her significance to the others in the layered strata of betrayal. And while the set may be ultrasimple-looking, it’s actually mechanically complex, using slow-moving concentric turntables that allow the chairs and actors to circle in opposite directions to fascinating effect. The tall, high-cheekboned Hiddleston, a classically-trained actor who has starred as Hamlet and Coriolanus, is in his element, as are his colleagues, in digging into Pinter’s pregnant pauses, elliptical sentences, and subtextual currents. Lloyd’s direction exploits the playwright’s mannerisms for all they’re worth, and the stage is often electric with unspoken thoughts and repressed feelings. But, over the course of 90 minutes, the plot’s revelations gradually lose power because, after all, the backward trajectory has begun by telling us the result of what has already happened and whose origins the play is seeking to uncover. There are few surprises in store in such a pattern, everything that transpires seeming only to put us on a path of diminishing returns. Betrayal is getting a first-class revival here, interestingly directed and designed, and played with just the kind of knowing reserve, cutting psychological insight, and brittle wit great British acting can provide. Every ounce of meaning would seem to have been squeezed from the dramatic tube. Yet,  in this coolly sophisticated, bitingly cerebral environment, the result is more head than heart, or, as I suggested before, more style than substance. All things considered, however, it’s definitely the best of my three Betrayals.

[ketaminewizard]

Oh, what's that? You read? That's cool, I read Homer, Pindar, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Arrian, Thucydides, Sappho, Plutarch, Ovid, Virgil, Lucretius, Arisoto, Horace, St. Augustine, Marcus Aurelius, Rabelais, Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Bruno, Boccaccio, Leopardi, Machiavelli, Luther, Cervantes, Chaucer, the Beowulf poet, Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, Sterne, Burton, Browne, Spenser, Wyatt, Sidney, Herbert, Percy Shelley, Tennyson, Donne, Pope, Dryden, Bacon, Novalis, Schelling, Schlegels, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Pascal, Lichtenberg, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, Dickens, Marlowe, Diderot, Jonson, Potocki, Goethe, Bunyan, Gibbon, Addison, Smollett, Milton, Johnson, Boswell, Emerson, Quincey, Burke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Mary Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Racine, Baudelaire, Valery, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Moliere, Montaigne, Browning, Gray, Holderlin, Schiller, Shaw, Voltaire, Hugo, Balzac, Zola, Colette, Duras, Dumas, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert, Mallarme, Malraux, Chateaubriand, Artaud, Poe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Keats, Arnold, Pater, Walter Scott, Swinburne, Thackeray, Rossetti, Carroll, William James, Henry James, Hawthorne, Twain, Melville, Dewey, Bergson, Whitehead, George Eliot, Williams, Frost, Cummings, Crane, Stevens, Whitman, Hughes, Plath, Trakl, Rilke, Celan, Montale, Neruda, Lorca, Tagore, Manzoni, Peake, Murdoch, Wharton, Wilde, Faulkner, O'Connor, Passos, Nietzsche, Adorno, Bloch, Lukacs, Bakhtin, Hamsun, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Andreyev, Bely, Bulgakov, Gonchorov, Camoes, Pessoa, Queiroz, Saramago, Paz, Borges, Bloy, Pirandello, Huysmans, Lautreamont, Schwob, Casares, Bolano, Cortazar, Lima, Donoso, de Assis, Carpentier, Celine, Marquez, Unamuno, Gracq, Gide, Jarry, Camus, Conrad, Wells, Hardy, Salinger, Anderson, Ford, Maugham, Lawrence, Forster, Hrabal, Swift, Bronte, Woolf, Bachelard, Roussel, Beckett, Proust, Nabokov, Joyce, O'Brien, Yeats, Waugh, Heaney, Pinter, Auden, Hofmannsthal, Mann, Musil, Broch, Zweig, Bachmann, Jelinek, Lessing, Laxness, Simenon,Svevo, Levi, Buzzati, Quasimodo, Moravia, Llosa, Walser, Kafka, Babel, Schulz, Transtromer, Kertesz, Pavic, Andric, Grossmann, Linna, Mahfouz, Boll, Grass, Canetti, Pavese, Robbe-Grillet, Blanchot, Perec, Queneau, Calvino, Bernhard, Gass, Barth, Gaddis, Vollmann, Vidal, Hawkes, DeLillo, Pynchon, McCarthy, McElroy, Soseki, Murasaki, Shonagon, Kawabata, Mishima, Akutagawa, Tanizaki, Dazai, Oe, Xingjian, Yan, Kosztolanyi, Gombrowicz, Ishiguro, Eco, Coetzee, Auerbach, Benjamin, Barthes, Pasternak, Derrida, de Man, Kristeva, Deleuze, Bateson, Foucault, Lyotard, Mcluhan, Eichenbaum, Davenport, Steiner, Munro, Carson, Handke, Arno Schmidt, Therouxs, Patrick White, Alfau, Marias, Enard, Claude Simon, Robinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Markson, Lowry, Bellow, Dara, Churchward, and Marx. Haha, you know the classics. 

Will you be my gf now?

[girafeduvexin]

Je viens d’apprendre que Pinter était juif, et son scénario sur Proust est le meilleur imo, so ça confirme ma théorie : only jews and gays know how to write about Proust.

[meandrichard]

A couple more, anyone?

A couple more, anyone?

Well, I’m not bored yet, as you may have guessed.

Woot woot got my Thorin map signed by Richard Armitage with my favourite Thorin quote pic.twitter.com/xfv5F247M0

— Ling (@bloodbubble) February 4, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Was actually really grateful Richard Armitage reminded us that Peter Jackson's WWI docu 'They Shall Not Grow Old' was on BBC this weekend. Took opportunity…

[biboocat]

A list of my favorite authors of fiction who identified as atheists follow. I didn’t know they were atheists before I read them, but I sensed they were from reading their works and later confirmed my impressions after a little research. They include: Anita Brookner, Elizabeth Taylor, W. Somerset Maugham Graham Greene, John Mortimer, E.M. Forster, Thomas Hardy and George Eliot.

There are favorite authors including Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Alain de Botton, and Christopher Hitchens whose atheism was made evident to me from their recorded talks and debates.

Other atheist authors I’ve enjoyed reading include: Issac Asimov, Douglas Adams, Kingsley Amis, J.G. Ballard, John Banville, Julian Barnes , Albert Camus, Arthur C. Clarke, J.M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Jim Crace, Harlan Ellison, Ursula Le Guin, Stanislaw Lem, John Fowles, Constance Garnett (translator), Nadine Gordimer, Robert Graves, Franz Kafka, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, H.P. Lovecraft, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Arthur Miller, Iris Murdoch, Pablo Neruda, Harold Pinter, Edgar Alan Poe, Salman Rushdie, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Jean Paul Sartre, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kurt Vonnegut, H.G. Wells, Simon Winchester.

There are numerous other atheist and agnostic authors I haven’t yet read. Some of these include: Virginia Woolf, Anton Chekhov, and Marcel Proust.

I am proud to share my atheism and humanism with them all. Peace, Love, & Morality without primitive superstition, sectarianism, or opposition to scientific progress.❤️

[dudewhoabides]

"𝖫𝖾𝗍 𝗎𝗌 𝖻𝖾 𝗀𝗋𝖺𝗍𝖾𝖿𝗎𝗅 𝗍𝗈 𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗉𝖾𝗈𝗉𝗅𝖾 𝗐𝗁𝗈 𝗆𝖺𝗄𝖾 𝗎𝗌 𝗁𝖺𝗉𝗉𝗒;

𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗒 𝖺𝗋𝖾 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝖼𝗁𝖺𝗋𝗆𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝗀𝖺𝗋𝖽𝖾𝗇𝖾𝗋𝗌 𝗐𝗁𝗈 𝗆𝖺𝗄𝖾 𝗈𝗎𝗋 𝗌𝗈𝗎𝗅𝗌 𝖻𝗅𝗈𝗌𝗌𝗈𝗆."

- Marcel Proust

Photographer Jon Pinter

[thehauntologicalsociety]

John Griffith Bowen

John Griffith Bowen was born in India, sent "home" to England at the age of four and a half, and was reared by aunts. He served in the Indian Army from 1943-47, then went to Oxford to read Modern History. After graduating he spent a year in the USA as a Fulbright Scholar, much of it hitch-hiking. He worked for a while in glossy journalism, then in advertising, before turning freelance when the BBC commissioned a six-part adventure-serial for Children`s Television. Between 1956 and 1965 he published six novels to excellent reviews and modest sales, then forsook the novel for nineteen years to concentrate on writing television drama (Heil Caesar: Robin Redbreast) and plays for the stage (After the Rain: Little Boxes: The Disorderly Women). He returned to writing novels in 1984 with The McGuffin: there were four more thereafter. Reviewers have likened his prose to that of Proust and P. G. Wodehouse, of E. M. Forster and the young John Buchan: it may be fair to say that he resists compartmentalisation. He has worked as a television producer for both the BBC and ITV, directed plays at Hampstead and Pitlochry and taught at the London Academy of Dramatic Art. He lives in a house on a hill among fields between Banbury and Stratford-on-Avon.

I began the Introduction to The Essay Prize, my own first volume of television plays (it did not sell well: there was never a second) with the question, "Why Write For Television?" and the answer I gave was that a television play is the only way by which a writer can "share a kind of insight, a way of looking at life, an enjoyment of the complexity of human motives, the ambivalence of human behaviour ... with those many people who do not have the habit of reading books", far less of going to the theatre.

Well, that is still true, but I was ten years younger then, and more easily swayed by my own rhetoric. The answer ignores the way television plays are sent out to this non-book-reading, non-theatre-going audience, as part of a continuous stew made up of items so diverse that they would be indigestible if anyone ever bothered to digest them. But the audience in general does not digest them. No effort is required of it, hardly even the effort of choice; no response is expected. The stew—your play, bobbing about in it—is received, excreted and forgotten. Nourishment is not a consideration.

Indeed, the stew-givers, both of the BBC and the commercial companies, often try to exclude even the possibility of nourishment. This play, Robin Redbreast, was first commissioned as a "suspense" play by the Series Department of the BBC and rejected. The producer is a kind and intelligent man: he was distressed to have to reject a play he admired, but the "close inter-relation between the fertility rite and the church festivals" would be too much, he wrote, for "the Powers-That-Be". Something taught in school sixth forms all over the country would be "too much" for the BBC Series Department. Luckily Graeme McDonald, who produces Play for Today for the BBC Drama Department, heard of the play, read it and instantly took it on.

Worst is the lack of a continuing life. All my novels except the last are out of print, but they are still borrowed (freely in every sense) from libraries. Dedicated amateurs win prizes at Drama Festivals with plays I wrote years ago. Films are shown throughout the world long after they have been made, and end on that very television which shows a play once, perhaps (but only on the BBC) repeats it, then wipes the tape, and the play, already forgotten by its audience, even ceases to exist as an artefact. Dead. All other forms of art continue to exist after the act of creation and first showing, except the television play. Unless, as Pinter, Peter Nichols, John Mortimer, John Hale, Alun Owen have done and I myself with this play—the writer re-works it for the theatre, and gives it a life after all.

And yet ... and yet. I say that, if I could afford to write only for the theatre I should do so, and certainly no television play could ever give author, actors and audience the real joy which is created when play, performance and audience come together in a theatre and all goes well. But there are ways of writing for television, ways of using images which, however I may free myself from realistic theatrical production, I can't match in the theatre. I admire naturalistic acting, and television can show it more closely than someone in whatever-shaped auditorium can see from six rows back. I say nowadays that I write television plays in order to buy time to write in other ways, but nobody writes only for money, and nobody would fret so about getting it right if money were the only consideration. There is still the possibility of excellence, and even if a television play ends up as a truffle in the stew, to be swallowed unrecognised by most, complained of by some ("What's this bit of coal doing in my stew?"), someone out there may yet know a truffle when he sees it, and savour it, and be glad.

Introduction to Robin Redbreast from The Television Dramatist, Published by Paul Elek Limited in 1973. © John Bowen 1970.

> The Truth Will Not Help Us: Embroidery on an Historical Theme (1956) > After the Rain (1958) > The Centre of the Green (1959) > Storyboard (1960) > The Birdcage (1962) > A World Elsewhere (1965) > Squeak (1983) > The McGuffin (1984) > The Girls: A Story of Village Life (1987) > Fighting Back (1989) > The Precious Gift (1992) > No Retreat (1994) >

> ITV Play of the Week: The Candidate (1961) > ITV Play of the Week: The Truth About Alan (1963) > ITV Play of the Week: A Case of Character (1964) > ITV Play of the Week: The Corsican Brothers (1965) > ITV Play of the Week: Mr. Fowlds (1965) > ITV Play of the Week: Finders Keepers (1965) > ITV Play of the Week: Ivanov (adaptation) (1966) > ITV Play of the Week: The First Thing You Think Of (1966) > After the Rain, Hampstead Theatre (1966) > ITV Play of the Week: ITV Summer Playhouse #9: The Voysey Inheritance (1967) > Thirty-Minute Theatre: Silver Wedding (1967) > ITV Playhouse: I Love You Miss Patterson (1967) > Play For Today: Robin Redbreast (1970) > Thirty-Minute Theatre: The Waiting Room (1971) > The Guardians, 7 episodes (1971), Villains: Belinda, London Weekend Television (1972) > Dead of Night: A Woman Sobbing (1972) > ITV Sunday Night Theatre: Young Guy Seeks Part-Time Work (1973) > ITV Sunday Night Theatre: The Coffee Lace (1973) > Heil Caesar, BBC (1973) > Play For Today: The Emergency Channel (1973) > A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (adaptation) (1974) > Play For Today: A Photograph (1977) > A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Ice House (1978) > Wilde Alliance: A Game for Two Players (1978) > ITV Playhouse: The Specialist (1980) > ITV Sunday Night Thriller: Dark Secret (Pts 1 & 2) (1981) > Screen Two: The McGuffin (1986) > Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, with David Cook, BBC (1996 - 1997) >

Image © The British Film Institute, used with kind permission.