Watch the start of this film version of Harold Pinter's latest play, 'Celebration', and you might think you were watching an episode of 'Abbot and Costello', or were a fly on the wall in a session of psychoanalysis, with its dialogues where each phase seems merely a provocative echo of the previous one. But before you dismiss it as empty rhetoric, the sheer cleverness of the words starts to strike you, aided by exemplary performances from all a cast who, one imagines, love the chance of having something this clever to say, and who make the words sound natural, even when the wider sequences are contrived. The entire work lasts for just forty five minutes and does have something of the feeling of an extract from a longer work, as if a collection of characters have wandered out from a wider plot and just started talking: people look for meaning in Pinter, but I'm not sure there's too much to find here. What can be found is great acting and a sense of the pure pleasure to be found in words.
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