Harold Pinter.

On 24 January 2010, BBC Two ran a 90-minute program on its Arena series called Harold Pinter–A Celebration, featuring poems and performances memorializing the dramatist, who had died on Christmas Eve, 2008. The first ten minutes of the program are posted below, which features Stephen Rea (reading the poem “Death”), Pinter’s long-time friend Henry Woolf (“Voices in the Tunnel”), a short fragment from Pinter’s final play Celebration, and Douglas Hodge (reading from Pinter’s marvellously funny memoir “Mac,” about Pinter’s acting mentor Anew McMaster). If time is at a premium for you (as it is for all of us), do not miss, especially, Rea’s performance of one of Pinter’s finest poems, which comes first:

In leaving you today, I also offer an excerpt from one of Pinter’s finest plays, the 1975 No Man’s Land, which Michael Gambon read at Pinter’s funeral at the writer’s request. It is one of the most beautiful passages in world drama of the past half-century, and I will allow it to linger:

I might even show you my photograph album. You might even see a face in it which might remind you of your own, of what you once were. You might see faces of others, in shadow, or cheeks of others, turning, or jaws, or backs of necks, or eyes, dark under hats, which might remind you of others, whom once you knew, whom you thought long dead, but from whom you will still receive a sidelong glance, if you can face the good ghost. Allow the love of the good ghost. They possess all that emotion … trapped. Bow to it. It will assuredly never release them, but who knows … what relief … it may give them … who knows how they may quicken … in their chains, in their glass jars. You think it cruel … to quicken them, when they are fixed, imprisoned? No … no. Deeply, deeply, they wish to respond to your touch, to your look, and when you smile, their joy … is unbounded. And so I say to you, tender the dead, as you would yourself be tendered, now, in what you would describe as your life.