Collected Screenplays 2: The Go-Between / The Proust Screenplay / Victory / Turtle Diary / Reunion

by Harold Pinter

These collected screenplays include The Go-Between, The Proust Screenplay, Victory, Turtle Diary, and Reunion.

609 pages, Paperback

First published November 20, 2000

About the author

Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993) and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.

Reviews

[David]

In this sample of Pinter's screenplays at any rate he demonstrates an absolute gift for getting the essence of much longer narratives condensed into coherent shorter forms. His "Proust Screenplay" (unproduced) seems to me a masterpiece; trims about 3,000 pages from Proust to good effect! In this volume, "The Go-Between" and "Victory" (read in the same summer for the same course many a year ago) were also familiar to me in their original novel formats. I felt that in each case Pinter had captured the essence of the story that I knew; I could not tell what was "missing." I wonder how Pinter would have written for the screen in his own right: all the scripts in the three volumes of collected screenplays are, I think, adaptations.