Interim Reports

Abstract

BETWEEN 1960 AND 1965, Pinter was not too productive, although it must be remembered that the plays produced so rapidly had been written over a longer period of time. Including the rejected play Night School, he wrote only three short plays for television; three or four more sketches, including a special cricket sketch performed by Pinter and Pleasance at a charity show given by the Lord Tavemers; and a short story. The new sketches, presented by Michael Bakewell on the British Broadcasting Corporation “Third Program,” consisted of “Applicant,” already published; “Dialogue for Three,” published in Stand magazine; and three that have not yet been published—“That’s All,” “That’s Your Trouble,” and “Interview”—all slight examples of Pinter’s comedy. In “That’s All,” Mrs. A and Mrs. B discuss the day on which they and a third woman visit the butcher and afterwards make a cup of tea; in “That’s Your Trouble,” two menabout-town discuss in a park the strains imposed upon a man who is carrying a sandwich-board; and in “Interview,” Mr. Jakes (i.e., a privy) is interviewed about trade in his pornographic book shop. As Bakewell commented in The Radio Times, the sketches show Pinter working in miniature “with all his remarkable feeling for the subtleties, manners and banalities of speech and action.”