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Laurence Olivier Presents: Harold Pinter's 'The Collection' (TV)
R2 - United Kingdom - Network Review written by and copyright: Paul Lewis (18th April 2009). |
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The Show
 Harold Pinter’s The Collection was originally written for television in 1961, as part of the series ITV Television Playhouse (Associated Rediffusion, 1956-68). The Collection was later adapted for the stage (by Pinter), and this 1976 adaptation was produced for Granada Television, as part of the series Laurence Olivier Presents. Directed by Michael Apted, it stars Laurence Olivier, Helen Mirren, Alan Bates and Malcolm McDowell. Running from 1976 to 1978, Laurence Olivier Presents delivered a series of television adaptations of famous plays, from Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Eduardo De Filippo’s Saturday, Sunday, Monday. The Collection revolves around four characters, James Horne (Bates), his wife Stella (Mirren), Harry Kane (Olivier) and Bill Lloyd (McDowell). Horne telephones Lloyd and arouses suspicion in Lloyd’s partner Kane. When Horne returns to Lloyd and Kane’s house one rainy evening, it is revealed that Horne believes that Lloyd has been conducting an affair with Horne’s wife, Stella. Horne confronts Lloyd, who tells him ‘I just don’t do such things. Not in my book … I wouldn’t dream of it’. Horne continues to goad Lloyd, who eventually responds by giving Horne a different version of events, suggesting that Stella kissed him but that he and Stella never engaged in intercourse. However, the next day Horne’s visit inspires suspicion in Kane, who challenges Lloyd. In turn, Horne challenges Stella. Horne once again visits Lloyd, the two men experiencing attraction and repulsion to one another; at the same time, Kane visits Stella, who offers yet another version of events. Finally, Horne is confronted by Kane, who suggests that Lloyd may simply have made the whole thing up. There are five different versions of what might have happened between Lloyd and Stella, including the suggestion that no affair took place at all. The focus is less on ‘what really happened’ than on the light that the ambiguity casts on the characters’ relationships. For this reason, The Collection is often compared to Luigi Pirandello’s 1918 play Cosi è (se vi pare)/Right You Are (If You Think You Are), in which a similarly ambiguous situation is presented and a third party must try to resolve two very differing versions of events (see Raby, 2001: 80). The ambiguity surrounding the enigma at the heart of The Collection, the question of whether or not Stella actually slept with Lloyd, is never resolved. However, Horne’s obsessive interrogation of Lloyd reveals hidden details about the characters’ relationships with one another, undermining Lloyd and Kane’s relationship and, it is suggested, reawakening within Horne a long-buried element of same-sex desire. In The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter: Its Basis in Ritual (1971), Katherine H. Burkman argues that ‘[t]he point is that all the characters are deeply shaken about themselves, that they clearly cannot know themselves or Stella absolutely’ (103). For Pinter, sexual relationships are ‘usually ritualized’ and ‘more concerned at times with territory than with sex’ (ibid.: 95). So when Horne discovers that Stella may have slept with Lloyd, Horne shows almost no sexual or emotional investment in his wife but simply sees Stella as a possession that has somehow been tainted; likewise, when Kane learns that Horne has visited Lloyd, he becomes instantly jealous and asserts that ‘I don’t want strangers coming into my house without invitation’. Consequently, the characters’ behaviour is almost primal, reduced to a ‘territorial imperative’, to borrow the title of Robert Ardrey’s 1966 book which suggests that core element of all living creatures is a need for territory. As a result, Burkman has discussed the characters’ behaviour in almost primal terms, suggesting that ‘[t]he two disturbed relationships in The Collection reveal the three men in their incomplete sexuality stalking one another in a super-sophisticated jungle’ (ibid.: 103). In the way that the narrative pivots on an indiscretion that has taken place at some point in the past and its focus on a domestic setting, The Collection refers the conventions of both traditional melodrama and the television soap operas that, at the time of the first broadcast of the teleplay, were becoming increasingly popular. In Pinter’s Comic Play (1985), Elin Diamond suggests that The Collection ‘parodies the conventions of melodrama and soap opera’ (92). Diamond argues that ‘Pinter parodies the melodramatic plot convention in which past sins create emotional chaos in the present’ (ibid.: 109). Pinter uses the form of both the melodrama and the soap opera, focusing on a domestic situation and exploring the way in which people’s relationships are torn apart by the revelation of an event that has taken place in the past. However, according to Diamond Pinter’s The Collection has one key difference from the genres of melodrama and soap opera: ‘[t]he instant gratifications of melodrama and soap opera are characteristically absent from Pinter’s emotional spectrum’, and the ‘arrangement of pause and silence and verbal maneuvring’ lead to a ‘filtering’ of feeling (ibid.: 112). As a consequence, The Collection ends with an ‘image of stalemate’ rather than a moment of epiphany (ibid.: 115). The play is filled with repressed sexuality and a near-constant threat of v violence; in the scenes between Lloyd and Horne, sexuality and the threat of violence are almost inextricable. The play obliquely refers to Kane and Lloyd’s gay relationship, with the suggestion that Lloyd is Kane’s ‘bit of rough’; to Horne, Kane suggests that he ‘can never take him [Lloyd] to parties’ due to Lloyd’s ‘slum mind’ which makes him a ‘slum slug’ who ‘crawls all over nice houses, leaving slime’. The two men live together, and Pinter uses subtle double entendres to suggest the that they are more than just friends in a way that, in 1961, was daring but by 1976 may have seemed somewhat tame, hence Bates’ and McDowell’s mutual decision to ‘do it camp’ (McDowell, 2002: np). Over a morning glass of grapefruit juice, Kane cattily bitches at Lloyd, ‘I’m sick and tired of that stairrod. Why don’t you put a screw in it or something? You’re supposed … You’re supposed to be able to use your hands’. Later, in a scene laced with sexual metaphor and the threat of violence, Lloyd offers Horne some ‘cheese. Look, I’ve got a splendid cheese knife. Don’t you think it’s splendid?’ Horne responds by asking, ‘Is it sharp?’ To this, Lloyd asserts, ‘Try it. Hold the blade. It won’t cut you; not if you handle it properly. Not if you grasp it firmly up to the hilt’. Later, Horne flourishes a fruit knife at Lloyd, suggesting that the two men stage a ‘mock duel’ in which ‘the first one who’s touched is a sissy’. When Horne picks up Lloyd’s cheese knife and asserts ‘I’ve got another one in my hip pocket’, Lloyd responds by suggestively asking him ‘What do you do, swallow them?’ In another scene clearly intended to skirt around the boundaries of television censorship in 1961, when the teleplay was first produced, Stella is shown lounging on her bed, stroking her white Persian cat whilst a faraway look plays across her eyes. The Collection appears to be uncut, running for 63:57 mins (PAL).
Video
The Collection is presented in its original broadcast screen ratio of 1.33:1. Shot on video, The Collection is well-presented here. There are intermittent, but minor, examples of tape wear.
Audio
Audio Audio is presented via a two-channel mono track. This is clear and without problems. There are no subtitles.
Extras
The DVD includes a 1998 episode of ITV’s flagship arts programme The South Bank Show focusing on Harold Pinter (42:47). Some edits have been made to the show, removing the distinctive opening credits sequence and its use of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Variations’. Presented in a screen ratio of 1.66:1 (non-anamorphic), Pinter discusses his work with The South Bank Show’s Melvyn Bragg. Bragg questions Pinter about some of his political writing, his experiences of anti-Semitism in London, as well as his work for the theatre.
Overall
Overall Admittedly, for most people Pinter is a love or hate proposition. However, The Collection is one of the strongest television adaptations of Pinter’s work. This adaptation of The Collection is held together by strong performances from its quartet of great actors: Bates, Olivier, Mirren and McDowell. Fans of Pinter’s work (or fans of any of the actors involved in this production) will find much to enjoy here, and this DVD contains a very good presentation of The Collection. The inclusion of a Pinter-focused episode of The South Bank Show ensures that this release receives a strong recommendation. References: Burkman, Katherine H., 1971: The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter: Its Basis in Ritual. Ohio State University Press Diamond, Elin, 1985: Pinter’s Comic Play. Bucknell University Press McDowell, Malcolm, 2002: ‘The Collection: McDowell’s Introduction’. [Online.] http://www.geocities.com/malcolmtribute/collection.html Raby, Peter, 2001: The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter. Cambridge University Press For more information, please visit the homepage of Network DVD.
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