Arena Harold Pinter Part 1

Nigel Williams's two-part film biography explores Pinter's life, work, and political passions - from his East End childhood to his work as an actor, his experience of both early critical rejection and adulation, his screenwriting, and his love of poetry and passion for cricket.
Part One explores Pinter's key theme - the room - through the very rooms in which he wrote his first great series of plays. Arena reveals the links between the plays and places, and meets the people who live there now. We visit the East London terraced house room where Pinter grew up and first wrote poetry; the theatre dressing room where he began to formulate his ideas about playwriting and language; the sitting room in the London cold-water flat where he wrote his first hit, The Caretaker, and his study in the bow-fronted house in Worthing, where he lived in the sixties with his first wife Vivien Merchant, and wrote The Homecoming.
Harold Pinter has given Arena exclusive access to personal recordings in which he talks frankly to his biographer Michael Billington. Presented for the first time on television, they tell Pinter's story in his own words, as he remembers it.

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Film & Animation

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[vivienmerchant]

This is a marvellous documentary, capturing so well the strange, poetic quality of places which silently contain ghosts. The blend of well-researched memories by people who really matter paired with sensitively filmed location footage is fascinating. The genesis of The Caretaker is particularly evocative, as is the relationship between Merchant and Pinter. The flat was up for sale very recently.