David Hare on the screenplays of Harold Pinter


"You could argue that it's hard to judge the overall flavour of Pinter's work without the realisation of the script on which he worked longest - A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, completed in 1972 - and on which he said he never felt he had wasted a moment, in spite of the fact that it was never made. But even without that finished film, it's possible to say Pinter has found himself writing repeatedly about class. The three films he made with Losey - The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between, are all, surprisingly, about aristocracy. And in the cheerless fuckpad in Betrayal, in the half-felt, half-meant location romance of The French Lieutenant's Woman, in the boozy, donnish watchfulness of Accident, in the repellent modern partnership between Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson in The Comfort of Strangers, and in the all-out marital war of The Pumpkin Eater, you see finished portraits of a queasy bourgeoisie, whose values and convictions - whose very sense of identity - seem to wobble about in a murky plasma of whisky and deceit."