More4 to show Pinter double bill

Published Wednesday 7 February 2007 at 12:05 by Liz Thomas

More4 will broadcast a Pinter double-header at the end of this month, featuring John Crowley’s film version of Celebration followed by Harry Burton’s master-class Working With Pinter.

James Bolam, Colin Firth, James Fox, Michael Gambon, Julia McKenzie, Sophie Okonedo, Stephen Rea and Penelope Wilton are among the stars that appear in the screen adaptation of Pinter’s acclaimed one-act play set in a exclusive West End restaurant. More4’s broadcast marks its television debut. It has been produced by Michael Colgan, the artistic director of Dublin’s Gate Theatre, and Alan Moloney of Parallel Films - the pair previously made Beckett on Film together.

The stage production of Celebration received its world premiere at the Almeida Theatre in 2002 as part of a double bill with The Room, and has since been performed worldwide.

Meanwhile Burton’s film Working with Pinter is an intimate close-up of the playwright at work with actors on scenes from several of his plays including extracts of No Man’s Land, Old Times and The Dumb Waiter, interspersed with a recently recorded revealing interview with the Nobel prize-winner and one of his oldest theatrical collaborators, Henry Woolf.