THE STORIES: The first portion of the triple bill, VICTORIA STATION, is a brilliantly funny yet eerily chilling dialogue between a bewildered taxi driver (who may have gone mad) and the exasperated dispatcher who is trying, without success, to dire
“A fascinating work . . . possessing extraordinary power. Masterful.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Brilliant, cranky, and eccentric, and the narrative passages are some of the most thrilling ever written.” —Library Journal “Some of the author’s most enduring themes—notably, sexual jealousy and betrayal—are present. . . . The narration shows traces of writers as various as Joyce and Beckett, e.e. cummings and J.P. Donleavy.” —The Washington Post “The Abbott and Costello meet Samuel Beckett dialogue . . . makes you laugh out loud.” —The Village Voice
THE STORY: A husband goes to his office politely asking if his wife's lover will be coming today. She murmurs 'Mmmm,' and suggests he not return before six. In order not to return before six he will no doubt visit a prostitute. A competition is glossily established. When the lover does come, he is the husband, which is not surprising. The kind of sex-play follows that suggests this is the necessary titillation, and the necessary release ofhostility, between a man who means to be master of the house and a wife who means to be both wife and mistress, whatever the house may be. But there is a flaw in the accommodation. The lover is weary of his mistress; she is no longer particularly appetizing. By the time he returns, as husband, in the evening, his wife is still disturbed by the news. The performance of the afternoon has begun to carry over into the reality (or pretense) of the evening. Suddenly the husband is not quite husband, diffident over his drink. He is blurring into the lover, at the wrong hour, and angrily. The wife must seduce him now as wife, not as mistress. She does. -NY Herald-Tribune.
A restaurant. Two curved banquettes. It's a celebration. Violent, wildly funny, Harold Pinter's new play displays a vivid zest for life. In The Room, Harold Pinter's first play, he reveals himself as already in full control of his unique ability to make dramatic poetry of the banalities of everyday speech and the precision with which it defines character. Harold Pinter's latest play, Celebration, and his first play, The Room directed by the author himself, premièred as a double-bill at London's Almeida Theatre in March 2000.
In a drama set in two bedrooms and a dark space, a man on his deathbed reviews his life, loves, and betrayals with his wife, while his two conspiratorial and emotionless sons sit in the shadows rationalizing their love-hate relationship with their now dying father and their inability to take steps to end the estrangement.
Harold Pinter has long been acknowledged as one of the most influential playwrights in contemporary theatre: his arresting and original works have left a lasting imprint on the development of the stage and screen while delighting audiences around the world.
Jacket description.back: In all of Pinter's plays, seemingly ordinary events become charged with profound, if elusive, meaning, haunting pathos, and wild comedy. In The Caretaker, a tramp finds lodging in the derelict house of two brothers; in The Dumbwaiter, a pair of gunmen wait for the kill in a decayed lodging house. Harold Pinter gradually exposes the inner strains and fear of his characters, alternating hilarity and character to create and almost unbearable edge of tension.
Harold Pinter has long been acknowledged as one of the most influential playwrights in contemporary theatre; his arresting and original works have left a lasting imprint on the development of the stage and screen while delighting audiences around the world. This, the first of four volumes, contains his first five plays, including The Birthday Party (1958), his first full-length drama; as well as two short stories—"The Black and White" and "The Examination"—both written before Pinter turned to the theatre. Pinter's exacting and complex use of language and the features that mark his "comedies of menace" are clearly realized in these plays and stories. His speech "Writing for the Theatre" introduces the volume and establishes the context for those early years. Includes: The Birthday Party The Room The Dumb Waiter A Slight Ache A Night Out "The Black and White" "The Examination" "Writing for the Theatre
“One of the most essential artists produced by the twentieth century. Pinter’s work gets under our skin more than that of any living playwright.” —New York Times Upon its premiere at the National Theatre, Betrayal was immediately recognized as a masterpiece. It won the Olivier Award for best new play, and has since been performed all around the world and made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley, and Patricia Hodge. Betrayal begins with a meeting between adulterous lovers, Emma and Jerry, two years after their affair has ended. During the nine scenes of the play, we move back in time through the stages of their affair, ending in the house of Emma and her husband Robert, Jerry’s best friend. “[Betrayal] deals with the shifting balance of power in triangular relationships, and with the pain of loss. . . . Pinter probes the corrosive nature of betrayal . . . a world where pain and loss are explored with poetic precision.” —Guardian “Betrayal is an exquisite play, brilliantly simple in form and courageous in its search for a poetry that turns banality into a melancholy beauty.” —Newsweek “There is hardly a line into which desire, pain, alarm, sorrow, rage or some kind of blend of feelings has not been compressed, like volatile gas in a cylinder less stable than it looks . . . The play's subject is not sex, not even adultery, but the politics of betrayal and the damage it inflicts on all involved.” —Times (UK)
Along with Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter holds an undisputed place in the front ranks of contemporary dramatists. In volume two of his collected works, the plays and revue sketches mark a period of transition, as Pinter’s characters and settings become more recognizably realistic, in contrast to the absurdist atmosphere of his earlier work. The Caretaker, which first brought him fame on both sides of the Atlantic, was called “a play of strangely compelling beauty and passion” by Howard Taubman of The New York Times. An essay by Pinter, “Writing for Myself,” introduces this collection. Includes: The Caretaker The Dwarfs The Collection The Lover Night School Trouble in the Works The Black and White Request Stop Last to Go Special Offer “Writing for Myself”
Dramatically depicts a government mental institution, ostensibly run to help the mentally ill, that is caught up in corruption and an ironic disregard for human life.
THE STORIES: THE DWARFS. The play is concerned with three young men, Len, Pete and Mark, and the scene of action shifts back and forth between Len's house and Mark's. Sometimes all three come together, sometimes only two, and often Len is on stage
THE STORY: Furthering the theme of political consciousness expressed so forcefully and eloquently in his earlier play One for the Road, the author's present play takes place in an anonymous country where individual liberties have been forfeited to the state. Set in a prison where the inmates are forbidden to speak their own language, the play is comprised of four terse, arresting scenes which make masterful use of nuance and subtle understatement (with sudden bursts of violence) to create an overwhelming sense of terror and shocking futility. In one scene uniformed officers taunt and belittle the women who have come to visit their men, who are political prisoners; in another a mother and son are allowed to speak only in the language of the capital, which they do not know; in the third scene a young woman accidentally sees a guard holding a limp, tortured man whom she knows to be her husband; and, in the final scene the old woman reunited with her bloody, trembling son and, though told she may now speak, she has been silenced so long that she cannot, or will not, do so. Quintessentially Pinteresque in its skillful use of pregnant pauses, resonant images and nightmarish utterances, the play is both enthralling theatre and a stirring reminder of what can happen when the power of the state becomes all-encompassing and the rights of the individual are forfeited, whether through neglect or weakness of will.
An essential collection for any admirer of Harold Pinter, this brand-new, updated edition of his own selection of his poems and prose includes three never-before-published pieces, the most recent of which he wrote in January 1995. Included are love poems, political diatribes, short stories, character portraits. Some are intimately connected with plays; others are intriguingly allusive, and all of them share Pinter's lean, taut, and sometimes jarringly original use of language. Katherine Burkman has said that "like Shakespeare, Pinter is a poet," and in this single volume we see that Harold Pinter is not only, as Irving Wardle has written in the London Times, "our best living playwright" but one of the most accomplished writers in the English language today.
In "The Birthday Party", a musician becomes the victim of a ritual murder. Everyone implacably plays out the role assigned to them by fate. "The Room" becomes the scene of a visitation of fate when a blind Negro suddenly arrives to deliver a mysterious message.
This revised third volume of Harold Pinter's work includes The Homecoming, Old Times, No Man's Land, four shorter plays, six revue sketches and a short story. It also contains the speech given by Pinter in 1970 on being awarded the German Shakespeare Prize. The Homecoming'Of all Harold Pinter's major plays, The Homecoming has the most powerful narrative line... You are fascinated, lured on, sucked into the vortex.' Sunday Telegraph 'The most intense expression of compressed violence to be found anywhere in Pinter's plays.' The TimesOld Times'A rare quality of high tension is evident, revealing in Old Times a beautifully controlled and expressive formality that has seldom been achieved since the plays of Racine.' Financial Times 'Harold Pinter's poetic, Proustian Old Times has the inscrutability of a mysterious picture, and the tension of a good thriller.' Independent No Man's Land'The work of our best living playwright in its command of the language and its power to erect a coherent structure in a twilight zone of confusion and dismay.' The Times
This revised third volume of Harold Pinter's work includes The Homecoming, Old Times, No Man's Land, four shorter plays, six revue sketches and a short story. It also contains the speech given by Pinter in 1970 on being awarded the German Shakespeare Prize. The Homecoming 'Of all Harold Pinter's major plays, The Homecoming has the most powerful narrative line...You are fascinated, lured on, sucked into the vortex.' Sunday Telegraph 'The most intense expression of compressed violence to be found anywhere in Pinter's plays.' The Times Old Times 'A rare quality of high tension is evident, revealing in Old Times a beautifully controlled and expressive formality that has seldom been achieved since the plays of Racine.' Financial Times 'Harold Pinter's poetic, Proustian Old Times has the inscrutability of a mysterious picture, and the tension of a good thriller.' Independent No Man's Land 'The work of our best living playwright in its command of the language and its power to erect a coherent structure in a twilight zone of confusion and dismay.' The Times
The reissuing of all his plays marks the arrival of Harold Pinter at Faber. These two plays were first performed as a double bill in 1960, first at the Hampstead Theatre Club and then at the Royal Court. They immediately established themes that Pinter developed in his later work.
Hailed by The New York Times as "one of the most important playwrights of our day," Harold Pinter is the author of The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, and The Caretaker--just a few of his plays that have become seminal works in our literary canon. In Various Voices, Pinter presents his own selections from over fifty years of prose, poetry, and political writings, offering insight into the man and his oeuvre. Now in paperback, this edition includes recently written new poems and prose. His nonfiction selections span "A Note on Shakespeare" (1950) to "An Interview with Mireia Aragay" (1996); the short stories begin with "Kullus" (1949) and end with "Tess" (2000); and the poetry ranges from "School Life" (1948) to "They All Rang" (1999). The political writings illustrate the lucidity of Pinter's views on human-rights issues.
The second volume of Harold Pinter's collected work includes The Caretaker. The Caretaker It was with this play that Harold Pinter had his first major success. The obsessive caretaker, Davies, is a classic comic creation, and his uneasy relationship with the enigmatic Aston and Mick a landmark in twentieth-century drama. 'The play remains a masterpiece.' Daily Telegraph The Collection This one-act play for television explores the sexual manoeuvres between two couples in the clothing trade. 'Taps the adrenal flow of contemporary guilt and anxiety.' Time The Lover Richard and Sarah conduct themselves with apparent respectability in the mornings, whilst living out a sequence of erotic rituals in the afternoons. 'Beautifully written... the sexiest play I remember seeing on the television.' Sunday Times The volume also includes Night School and The Dwarfs, plus five revue sketches written during the same period.
First presented by the Royal Court Theatre in London in September of 1996, Ashes to Ashes is a triumph of power and concision. In the living room of a pleasant house in a university town outside of London, Devlin, threatened by his wife Rebecca's recollections of an abusive ex-lover, questions her relentlessly in his need for a single truth. In her seamless blending of what she knows of violence with the wider violence of the world, Rebecca reveals an eerie communion with the dead victims of unnamed political barbarities.
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