Harold Pinter’s Screen Adaptation of King Lear

In March 2000 the playwright Harold Pinter completed a screenplay adaptation of King Lear. Commissioned by the actor and director Tim Roth, the project was to have been made by the production company Film Four, but funding issues led to its abandonment. To date, Pinter’s screen version has received little scholarly attention, and what has been written dismissive, describing it as faithful adaptation...[but] too much so’ and ‘a costume drama rendition’. In this paper I want to defend Pinter’s screenplay by drawing on Jack Jorgen’s influential definitions of Shakespearian cinema in his 1977 book Shakespeare on Film to argue that Pinter’s adaptation belongs firmly within the Realist / Filmic mode rather than the Theatrical. Drawing primarily on archival materials held at the Harold Pinter Archive at the British Library, the paper will look at some of the key changes that Pinter makes - changes that while owing a debt in part to Peter Brook’s 1971 film adaptation, is in several respects an innovative and surprising contribution to Shakespeare’s screen life.