Product Description
Part of a collection of Harold Pinter's works, this is a comedy of sexual manners in which Pinter captures the psyche's sly manoeuvres for self-respect with sardonic forgiveness. Written in 1978 by the author of "The Caretaker", "The Lover", "The Homecoming" and "The Birthday Party". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

crisp and magical
it was the first work by Harold Pinter that i read. true to his name Pinter creates puny silences and vivid pauses that say more about their characters and their inner drama than the words they utter. Pinter taeches no moral lesson. He only presents the inner turmoil, the utter helplessness , and the void inside his characters. for its literary merits the work can just be called PINTERESQUE.

Short, somewhat cryptic scenes from a marriage.
This is a play about three people - Jerry, Robert and Emma. Emma's married to Robert but has a long affair with Jerry. They are sophisticated, upper class, white people in England in the 1970's. The play is about Jerry's hooking up with Emma over a period of years, the fact of Robert finding out, and the ending of their marriage, for possibly unrelated reasons, some time later. Oh yeah, and it's told in reverse chronological order.

It's a spare play. I don't know if I'd call it minimalist. There are only three characters, aside from a waiter. The don't do a whole lot. The dialogue has the patented Pinter style, like a tennis ball going from side to side without ever hitting the ground:

Jerry - What do you want to do then?
PAUSE
Emma - I don't know what we are doing, any more, that's all.
Jerry - Mmnn.
PAUSE
Emma - Can you actually remember when we were last here?
Jerry - In the summer was it?
Emma - Well, was it?
Jerry - I know it seems -
Emma - It was the beginning of September.
...

It's 138 pages of that.

Pinter's won the Nobel prize and he's one of the most influential playwrights of the late 20th century and this is considered one of his greatest achievements. IMHO though, I found it lifeless, and the reverse chronological plot gimmicky.

Bingo
Sometimes you hit a triple but everyone remembers it as a homer. Pinter has this sort of luck. "Betrayal" is a good play, don't get me wrong. It is somewhat worrying to me that theatre-goers see this as a great play. Great? To be compared to, say, "Hamlet"? It's a good play. The backward plot device is clever and useful and fun. It's delicious in that the betrayal is all done in that wonderful English fashion of brittle humor, lots of contained pain, and no passion. It's all done in exquisitely good taste. Razor burns, not gouged eye-balls. Pinter, who began his career putting the lower-middle class on stage, with their "cuppa" teas and bad breath, has moved here into the upper-middle class, with their Italian wines and weekends to France. Pinter is one of the most upwardly mobile playwrights in theater history. Refinement is as worthy a subject, surely, as degradation, he seems to be saying and, by golly, I guess he's right.

Still Amazing
This play is still one of the best contemporary plays available.I just re-read it and am amazed at how the language and human mystery remain riveting.Remarkable.

Yeah, okay...
The book is poorly bound, and the content is rather dull after all.I think Pinter is over-rated. ... Read more

Product Description
Collects some of the author's most famous writings, including plays, short stories, and essays. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Revue Sketches
I saw the Revue Sketches animated with the original dialogue on PBS in the late 60's.'Trouble in the Works', a dialogue between the owner and head foreman in a machine parts factory, was hilarios with a lot of punning on the names of the parts.'Last to Go' was also a funny and poignant sketch about a minimal conversation between a corner newspaper seller and customer about which London daily is the last one sold.The other plays I'm not familiar with. ... Read more

Product Description
This volume collects some of the author's most famous writings, including plays, short stories, and essays. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Saying Everything With Very Little
Alas this isn't the best of his works - Death etc. was most impressive. But The Room and The Black and White make for fascinating reads, and should be even more exciting when staged. This should come before Beckett in anyone's reading.

Elegantly Absurd
HAROLD Pinter's career as a playwright is highly distinguished by anyone's reckoning. Many critics have no reservations in calling him 'our greatest living playwright'. But few would argue that it is on a handful of stage plays, from The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, and The Homecoming in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to Old Times, No Man's Land, and Betrayal in the 1970s, that his reputation rests.

In recent times, Pinter's celebrity has depended more on his politics than on his plays. The master of the dramatic pause now seems more of a rebel without a pause, taking almost every opportunity to make moral pronouncements on current affairs. A scathing critic of US foreign policy and British Government support for it, he was prominent in the popular campaign against the recent Iraq war, even penning a poem in the lead-up to the conflict: 'Here they go again/The Yanks in their armoured parade/Chanting their ballads of joy/As they gallop across the big world/Praising America's God...'

In an earlier letter to the New York Review of Books in 1994, Pinter differentiated US foreign policy from the mass murder inspired by Hitler, Stalin and Mao only on the grounds of its moral hypocrisy: 'The great difference between the ruthless foreign policy of the US and other equally ruthless policies is that US propaganda is infinitely cleverer and the Western media wonderfully compliant'.

What's your point?
One review of Pinter's plays says that "part of the greatness of Pinter's work is that I'm at a loss to explain it."What complete and utter rubbish!Basically that means that either Pinter is great because I'm too dumb to understand him, or Pinter is great because he makes no sense, so obviously he is really deep and profound.Well here's my take: I'm comfortably on the upper half of the food chain when it comes to intelligence, and when I'm at a loss to explain why an author's work is great, it's because his work, in fact, is not great.I wouldn't say the same thing about nuclear physics or brain surgery - when somebody does great work in those fields and I don't understand it, I'll chalk it up to "this guy might be really smart and I just don't know what he's talking about."But literature?Come on... the whole point of literature is that it is supposed to connect with the reader, not bewilder him.It's supposed to reveal meaningful truths about humanity, not leave us feeling dazed and confused.It's supposed to create a bond between writer and reader, not create a vast intellectual divide.

So back to Mr. Pinter... He's just not all that good.I will say a few nice things about him.The plays aren't boring, as some people have suggested.Seriously, how can you get bored reading a play that's only 30 pages long?The cadence of the dialog is catchy, and the plays have a certain rhythm to them that you can tap your foot to.And Pinter is very good at creating a sense of anxiety within his characters.Since there isn't much going on in these plays in terms of action, and since the stage is sparsely decorated, and the dialog is often terse and stunted, the reader ends up focusing more on what is not there, and what is not happening, and what is not being said, rather than what is.So you constantly ask yourself, Who are those people in the basement that we know nothing about and who we are never going to meet?What is this job that is going to be done, but never gets described in any kind of detail?By building his plays around characters who never appear and events that never occur, Pinter forces us to wonder anxiously about the unknown.He creates this eerie sense of mystery, this feeling that we are all alone in a world that we know very little about.

But here's the key question: So what?Sure, he's good at making us feel uncomfortable, but he doesn't take it any farther than that.You would think that to win the Nobel Prize, your readers would at least have to understand why you want them to feel uncomfortable.What is your message?What are you saying about our world and the human experience?It's simply not enough to create a mood.There has to be a point to it, and it's just not clear what the point is to these plays.

What a waste of time and money
First, the reason for one star is a reminder to leave Pinter's plays to others.

I read the "The Birthday Party," and, "The Room," and may or may not read the rest of the plays.

Informatively I am an avid reader with a vast collection.

The Birthday Party and The Room did not have one redeeming feature. I could not believe that anything written could be so bad.

In my opinion both were absolute garbage and I wonder how and why in the first place it was every published. When I finished reading this nonsense a thought came to mind as follows:
If a monkey was placed by a computer keyboard and was allowed to
go crazy hitting the keys, the result would probably be, "The Birthday Party and The Room.

Since I was punished enough reading the above, reading the rest of the plays would only compound my bewilderment and disappointment in choosing this book.

If this book was offered to a publisher by a writer other than Harold Pinter and the editor read the first two plays, if he read that far, which I doubt, he would have thrown the book in his waste basket followed by an oath.

Unfortunately, I purchased a couple of the Pinter Books from Amazon.com and will check them out only because I purchased them
and am curious to learn if they are as bad a read as the one I reviewed.

Robert Lyons
Reno, Nevada

A Nobel undeserved
Pinter's work is the proof that you can manage to be boring without being longwinded. I have always found him close to impossible to read. As for the famous pauses and threats which make his onstage theatre so compelling to his fans, these I have found only heighten the annoying quality ofthe reading.

Pinter is an heir of Beckett and belongs to 'The Real Mankind is the diminished broken fragment of itself' school.
But these broken voices, these characters always seeming to menace and imprison each other, present a kind of picture of humanity at one minor extreme only.

Pinter in his political work presents himself as a spokesman for the oppressed of Mankind and has for years attacked theUnited States.

The United States is without its faults, mistakes and misjudgments nonetheless the single major force in the world which prevents Mankind from falling into a dark night of Totalitarian Terror.

To take advantage of the freedoms given by the world's democracies to attack in an exaggerated way these democracies
is the kind of moral teaching which can lead Mankind to nothing but a 'dark night of the soul' in which no one will ever dare to read the kind of literary work Pinter has devoted his life to. ... Read more

Product Description
Collects some of the author's most famous writings, including plays, short stories, and essays. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Brilliant Pinter
Pinter may not be for everyone but he sure is my taste. His heavily sub textual plays let the reader/audience figure things out for themselves and maintain a desirable sense of mystery and passion that has no definitive answer, as art should be it can be molded by those who see it.

I must read for any theater lover, or someone who think all theater sucks.

comedic absurdity
A master of slapstick dialogue, Pinter forces the reader to analyze the efficiency of one's language and it's ability to convey one's meaning.Indeed, a must-read for anyone interested in theater of the absurd. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
When Teddy, a professor in an American university, brings his wife Ruth to visit London and his family, he finds himself prey to old conflicts. But now it is Ruth who becomes the focus of the family's struggle for supremacy. The playwright's other works include "The Birthday Party" and "Old Times". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (15)

Weak
Quite displeasing, featuring a long sequence of arbitrary and unpleasant action, revolving around characters that are even more simplistic and unappealing. The dialog fails to be very believable, and fails even more at being rhetorically appealing. I'm left baffled by Pinter's fame and critical success, and am thoroughly uninterested in reading his other material.

Worse than: The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington
Better than: Hylozoic by Rudy Rucker

All good
Book came nicely shrink wrapped and (for some reason) in two envelopes.Excellent condition.Very kindly they sent US MAIL to Hawai'i.Media mail can take up to two months (it really does come by boat!)

About what we fear deep down
The homecoming has been described as a Jewish family play, though this is a little patronising for it illuminates single truths. The action takes place in a single room. It is tense, taught, claustrophobic in the extreme. Teddy, a successful academic and his beautiful wife return to his family home in North London, a male only household. His brothers have not achieved as he has, instead they operate on the murky fringes of working class society. Lenny, in particular is a sly and dangerous man. He is well aware of the unspoken masculine power dynamics at play, and pulls the strings with devious and malevolent effect. The play becomes tighter and tenser as the action progresses. Eventually, rips occur - tears in the fabric of the surface of close family life. Surreal and astonishing things happen. Characters behave according to their true natures. Personalities are laid bare in their essence. Pinter shows us what we fear deep down in our relations with others, but are afraid to face head on.

Whorecoming


At first this play seems like a good absurd/kitchen sink 60s
English play, with the usual dysfunctional family characters.It
is that but with the character of Ruth, things get really weird-even
for this group of people. They're a pretty perverted bunch, but I still
enjoyed the play.Though Ruth stills seems like something pretty
unexpected, but that's what the theatre is sometimes all about.If
I were Ruth I'd get back to the USA ASAP.

Pinter and the Theater of the Absurd
This Harold Pinter play belongs to the theater of the absurd tradition. It does not seek to portray life as it is authentically or realistically but gives us a view of life through a crazed mirror image. It is life seen as an absurd concoction in which desire is realized and the abnormal replaces the normal. The setting is deceiving: a realistic seedy London living room, but the family who dwell therein veer off the track into the world of the absurd.
We get to know a great deal about the pasts of these characters: an old man, his brother Sam, his three grown sons, and the wife of one of the sons. She and her husband are visiting from America where he is a philosophy professor. They have left their three little sons at home. We see a large slice of the ordinary lives of these six people. But people in real life don't act this way, theatergoers say. Of course they don't. Why go to the theater to see the commonplace, the ordinary? Why not see what would happen when libidos take over?
I saw an insightful production of this play on Broadway on January12, 2008. It featured Ian McShane as Max, the nasty father, Raul Esparza as Lenny, the pimp. Eve Best played the enigmatic sexual tease Ruth, and three other fine actors rounded out the cast. The play was full of menace, irony, and shock, but with many bits that drew laughter. The father and his two stay-at-home sons have a low opinion of women, and Ruth certainly reinforces that view. Lenny talks about his violence toward women. Teddy, the philosophy teacher, an ersatz intellectual, acquiesces to his wife staying with the family as a tart stoically and unfeelingly.
The father knows his sons' and his brother's weaknesses, and he cruelly exploits them. Everything seems sinister and threatening. Lenny blows his stack over trivial matters: his brother Teddy has deliberately eaten the cheese sandwich he was saving for himself while Teddy blithely accepts that his wife is deserting him and staying with his family to become a hooker. The trivial becomes earthshaking, and crucial matters become trivial. She does not do what a real person would do, but what a woman might do if she let her deeper, darker nature take over. The father's brother Sam ineffectual and impotent. Early on Max says to Same that he should get married and bring his wife home to live in the family manse so everyone can "enjoy" her.
The readers or the audience squirm in their seats and don't get it. Since this play was written forty-two years ago, the audiences have lost their understanding of the absurdist traditions and have slipped back into their state of undemanding, timid and risk-free theatergoing. Nobel prize winner Pinter blazed new ground for them, and they are right back where they started from.
... Read more

Product Description
During the past ten years, Harold Pinter has written a new play, three film scripts, sheaves of poems, several sketches and created, with composer James Clarke, a pioneering work for radio, Voices. He has acted on stage, screen and radio, he has appeared on countless political platforms, and his work has been extensively celebrated in festivals at Dublin's Gate Theatre and New York's Lincoln Center. In 2005, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and in 2006, the European Theatre Prize. As if this were not enough, he has in the last five years twice come close to death. But he has faced hospitalisation with stoic resilience and his spirit remains as fiercely combative as ever. He wrote in 2005 to Professor Avraham Oz, one of Israel's leading internal opponents of authoritarianism: 'Let's keep fighting.'Amazon.com Review
London theater critic Michael Billington draws on interviewswith the noted British dramatist, his friends, and coworkers toexplore the links between Harold Pinter's life and works like The Birthday Partyand Betrayal. Hediscovers a good deal of autobiography, as well as politicalcommentary on the power struggle implicit in male-femalerelations. The account of Pinter's youth in London's East End and hisclose friendships with other smart, iconoclastic Jewish boys isespecially good. Intelligent and accessible, this is a fine theaterbiography for the general reader. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Pause for reflection on Pinter
A thoughtful and admirably complete survey of Pinter's life and career so far, even if it betrays the signs of being an "authorized" biography. I say so far because the author makes it very plain that Pinter is far from a spent force, either creatively or politically. Given the tiresome and almost ritualistic bollocking (a very Pinteresque word) he receives in the British press every time he signs a petition or attends a protest, the book comes on like a stern corrective, exposing the thoughtless double standard for what it is. Far from being a relatively recent fashionable pose taken by a celebrity intellectual, Billington makes clear that Pinter's political outspokenness is an organic consequence of his work in the theatre, which was essentially political from the start. Pinter's plays have followed a slow arc since the late fifties from the domestic to the more specifically political, but the overriding concern has been the same - the potential for language to conceal rather than to reveal meaning, even to corrupt our need to hope that transparency between people is attainable. Hope for Pinter lies in the potential for resistance to this process through imaginative identification with the sufferings of others.

If I have a criticism, it is the author's tendency to overstatement in sometimes irritating contrast to his subject's famous economy. Also, that the equivalence between personal intimate action and political reality comes a little too easy. I mean what does the phrase "sexual Fascism" (p. 377) really mean? I suspect that a victim of actual political Fascism wouldn't find that glib metaphor so easy to digest. Such phrases, which appear here and there in the book, would seem to be an example of the verbal laziness that Pinter himself spends so much time fighting. However, thanks are due to this author for constant emphasis on the actual performance of Pinter's texts, whether written for the screen or the theatre. Billington's comment and analysis of the performances are always insightful and interesting.

Making Sense of Pinter
Having nearly walked out of "The Room" at the Almeida theatre in London, I determined to find out more about Pinter. This book sets the context and is a must for anyone new to Pinter or - like me - too young to have grown up with his work. The account of his early life in London's East End, and subsequent years as an actor in repertory theatre, are especially interesting. The Grocers school in Hackney was outstandingly successful in bringing out the best in its pupils - educationalists today can learn so much from it. And in turn we can learn so much from Pinnter about what it's like to be the "outsider" in a closed society. And his plays are so evocative of their vintage - it's hard to believe for example that as recently as the mid-1950s in England it was perfectly legal for a landlord to place a sign outside a house saying "To let - no blacks or Irish". The book also reveals Pinter's huge courage and passion in arguing for causes in which he believes. A wonderful book about a man who can justifiably claim to be one of the world's leading playrights. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (4)

Pinter's First Play, Absurdity Rules!
"The Room" (1957) was Harold Pinter's first play, a one act piece, and it demonstrates some of the Absurdist features we grew to know so well: the seemingly aimless conversation, the sense of menace, dread, and terror, real violence or lurking violence, the Pinterian pauses, the feeling that we are in alien territory dealing with characters who don't seem to be in control of their destinies.
Of course none of us is in control of his or her destiny, but in this play Rose doesn't know if the room is still hers, who her landlord is, and who are the strange people who enter the room and seem to be attempting to control her life. Is Mr. Kidd the landlord? If he is, he doesn't know how many floors the house has. Rose asks him questions; he evades answering them or doesn't comprehend.
The stranger Riley calls her Sal, and says she is wanted at home. She's puzzled; we're puzzled, and that's part of what Pinter is saying--we live in an existential world in which we operate and wait for we know not what.
Pinter took his cue from Samuel Beckett and brought his audience into new territory where the norms of behavior were altered, into a world of questions without answers. But Pinter the artist was able to create an alternative world in which his plots intrigue us, his dialogue has its own beauty and majesty, and his characters fascinate us.
Pinter changed the audience's expectations, shook them out of their usual theater-going habits and made them think. He made them anxious, antsy with his skittish people in his edgy plays. Rose says, "Who did bring me into the world?" Why, Pinter did, of course.
Rose Hudd talks endlessly in the beginning, and her husband Bert says nothing. It's cold and damp, and he has to take the van out. When he comes back he talks briefly about his trip and savagely confronts a stranger, and Rose ends up transformed.
Pinter often used the enclosure of a single room: human beings were caged in, caught in a claustrophobic situation. The play seems slow-moving yet a great deal happens. Great portent is conveyed quite quickly. He's a shock and awe artist.
There's always the possibility Pinter is toying with us, seeing what he can get away with, seeing if his quirky stuff will go over, conning us.
I have reviewed "The Birthday Party" elsewhere on Amazon.

The Birthday Party
The Birthday Party is a very good play about a young man and his inevitable and perhaps unavoidable fate. The plot is quite simple, yet it is also elegant in its simplicity. Without saying too much, the story is about a young man who has been living for some time in a beach-sited boarding house owned by a mid-aged couple. These characters lives' are invaded by two men who for some unknown reason want to catch the young man. The story evolves...

The play is captivating and exciting, at some points also downright scary. Pinter has obviously used techniques of how to seize the attention of an audience, something a reader will surely experience. The incertainty and unease that fills the story is highly credible, as one easily can identify the feelings that fills you when something sudden, dangerous and unavoidable happens to you.

I think Pinter perhaps has found inspiration in other authors works. As I read it, I came to think on Hemingways short story "The Killers" and the sense of utter despair of Kafka's "The Trial". Please do not shoot me should you disagree..

As a play, one recognizes elements that characterize most great playwrights, both classical and modern, due to its "actor-friendliness" and room for interpretation.

Recommended, indeed.

And one last thing to Ken (The reviewer): Unless you follow the idea that Meg has a brain-disfunction, She is definitely not Stanleys mother.

sinister intent?
Harold Pinter's _The Birthday Party_:

A young man lives with his mother at a run-down boarding house near the beach.Two visitors come and shake things up.They don't do anything wild or unusual, but they question and intimidate the young man, until the reader becomes unsure what sinister plans the two men have in mind.

Pinter's strength lies in his dialogue, which is thoroughly believable and memorable.Not for a moment does the reader doubt that these scenes could happen (and may HAVE happened) in real life.

As this reader read the play, the tension built and built, as I became more and more sympathetic to the young man, awaiting to learn his fate, as his own will seemingly deteriorated.

I would agree that this play is a funny read, but it's certainly very unsettling as well.

If you haven't read anything by Harold Pinter, or are curious because you've read his other plays, _The Birthday Party_ is worth checking out.

ken32

Laugh Out Loud, Funny!
A side splitting send up of the misunderstood artist.

One of the funniest plays of the century, by one of England's greatest playwrights.

Bring your knife and fork! ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

An excellent, haunting collection.
Harold Pinter uses silence like a visual artist uses negative space.He uses it as the framework around which to place his stunning, sparse dialogue.The three short plays in this collection are some of his best.The first one, `Family Voices', tells the story of a dysfunctional family indirectly through letters they send to each other.The second play, `One for the Road' is a tense, suspenseful piece set in an oppressive police state.The last work in the collection, `A Kind of Alaska' features a woman waking from a coma after three decades and dealing with the fact that she is no longer a teenager.

The above descriptions don't do justice to the complexity in each play.Pinter is able to express multiple levels with very few words and simple sets.Not only have I read each of these plays, I have seen them performed and I have acted in them.The experience is nearly as intense no matter how you encounter them.This collection, in particular, does a good job of presenting the works.The words are clear and easy to read and the dialogue is well-spaced.I can recommend this collection to any fan of unusual, gripping theater. ... Read more

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In this volume, Devlin questions his wife Rebecca in his quest for the truth about her involvement with an abusive ex-lover. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Haunting but not as successful as his other plays of this era
Harold Pinter's 1996 play ASHES TO ASHES is a dialogue between Rebecca and Devlin, a married couple. Devlin is curious about Rebecca's former lover, here called a factory owner, here called a travel agent, who dominated her completely:

"REBECCA: Well, he would stand over me and clench his fist. And then he'd put his other hand on my neck and grip it and bring my head towards him. His fist ... grazed my mouth. And he'd say 'Kiss my fist.' " Devlin's proddings reveal that Rebecca's lover was no ordinary travel agent. "REBECCA: He did work from a travel agency. He was a guide. He used to go to the local railway station and walk down the platform and tear all the babies from the arms of their screaming mothers." Through these revelations, interspersed with the most banal of everyday conversation, Rebecca and Devlin remember, retell, and eventually re-enact the horrible shared history of the 20th century, with its Holocaust, wars, and massacres.

The brutality it recounts can make the reader or spectator very uncomfortable, and ASHES TO ASHES succeeds in reminding us of the horrors of the 20th century, horrors that any human being can fall into creating. However, I do not think it is quite as successful as other plays Pinter wrote in this same era, such as "Mountain Language" or "Party Time." Incidentally, I must express my disappointment that American edition altered Pinter's original text, giving "soccer" instead of "football".

ASHES TO ASHES
ONE OF HAROLD PINTER'S RECENT PLAYS, THIS DRAMA GRAPHICALLY EXPLORES CONCERNS OF THE PLAYWRIGHT'S THAT HAVE BEEN FOREMOST IN HIS WRITING SINCE THE BEGINNING OF HIS CAREER ALONG WITH THOSE THAT HAVE BEEN FOREGROUNDEDFOR THE PAST TWO DECADES.QUESTIONS ABOUT THE NATURE OF REALITY, HUMANRELATIONSHIPS, AND INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS ARE BLENDED WITH HISPOLITICAL INTERESTS, MOST PARTICULARLY WITH HIS EXPLORATION OF THEHOLOCAUST.

IN THIS GRIPPING STAGE PLAY, THE HEROINE TELLS A MAN ABOUTHER MEMORIES OF SEEING CHILDREN, HER OWN CHILD BEING AMONG THEM, BEINGRIPPED FROM THEIR MOTHER'S ARMS BY MEN IN UNIFORM, ONE OF WHOM WAS HERLOVER.BUT, THE MAN CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHAT SHE IS SAYING, AND SHE IS TOOYOUNG TO HAVE BEEN INVOLVED IN THE HOLOCAUST.SO, IS SHE REMEMBERINGANOTHER, MORE RECENT HOLOCAUST, OR HAS THE HOLOCAUST BECOME PART OF AJUNGIAN, RACIAL MEMORY?

ALTHOUGH NOT A MODERN CLASSIC LIKE THE HOMECOMINGOR OLD TIMES, THIS IS ONE OF THE DRAMATIST'S MOST MOVING WORKS. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

"Never Missed a Day at Night School"
I reckon that MOONLIGHT is Harold Pinter's modern update of James Joyce's classic tale, THE DEAD.Andy, the old pig reprobate who lies dying while his wife watches, apparently devoted to him but inwardly nursing a whole different set of feelings, -- Andy is a lot like Andy Sipowicz of the USA network cop show NYPD Blue.Ian Holm played the part in the premiere ten years ago and I imagine he was very good.Or you can picture Marlon Brando playing in MOONLIGHT along the lines of his part in LAST TANGO IN PARIS.Alas, those days are far behind us now.The wife is very secretive and you know she hasn't had a happy life having to put up with Andy's incessant vulgarity and prejudice, not to mention the way he arranged their family life so that their two sons are at each other's throats.The wife, Bel, bides her time and drops her bombshell just at the appropriate moment -- I don't want to give away any spoilers, but if you know Joyce's story "The Dead" you already know what kind of secret a wife can keep for many years.MOONLIGHT is a wonderful play and a good one for college productions too, though I wouldn't recommend it for high school due to the rough language and the advanced themes of aging, disintegration, and death.However many a young ingenue will thrill to be given the part of "Bridget," a real Audrey Hepburn "Ondine" role if ever there was one.A part Pinter is said to have based on the crazy mad Lucia Joyce.

"Once someone said to me-I think it was my mother or my father--anyway, they said to me--We've been invited to a party.You've been invited too.But you'll have to come by yourself, alone.You won't have to dress up.You just have to wait until the moon is down."Thus begins Bridget's climactic speech, one of the greatest monologues in the modern theater.Audiences eat it up like it was cotton candy.

Art of Dying
Being a long time Pinter fan I read Moonlight several times a while back with a view to staging it. The fact of someone dying in an unpeaceful, bitter way makes for a fairly gloomy canvas but Pinter succeeds in givinghis dark protagonist a meaningful depth which hints at possible redemption,if not for himself then perhaps for his family. This pathos is offsetbrilliantly throughoutof the play by the subtley hilarious, sardonicrepartee that characterises Pinter at his best. Andy, who is ill, lies inbed for most of the play and bickers nastily with his long suffering wifeabout their misremembered past and estranged children. The sons, inseparate scenes on the other side of the stage attempt to unravel themeaning of their own dysfunctional lives and rivalry, thereby mirroringtheir parents while the daughter, incameo appearances, is the vessel forall that is potentially good and redeemable in the family.I readsomewhere that the play works on stage very well in its evocation of deathand has the audience silently gripped during the denouement if done well. ... Read more

Product Description
Do Hirst and Spooner really know each other, or are they performing an elaborate charade? The ambiguity - and the comedy - intensify with the arrival of Briggs and Fraser. All four inhabit a no-man's-land between time present and time remembered, between reality and imagination. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Classic Robb White
This book tells the tale of a young marine toxicologist who discovers a sunken WWII sub chaser in the lagoon of a Pacific atoll where he is studying the local fauna. It seems the islandis covered by a "taboo" in local legend that keeps people away not just from the island, but also the immediate area. While this causes some problems, the trouble really starts when the subchaser is uncovered by a typhoon that washes away much of the sandy bottom of the lagoon. There is something on the sunken subchaser that people are willing to kill for.

It is in many ways this book is classic Robb White. A young man (early 20s) on his own, sunken treasue, sailing, and a bit of WWII intrigue thrown in. Not his very best work in my opinion, but certianly enjoyable and well written. The characters are fairly well developed, and the plot consistent, with a few very nice twists. It felt a lot like "Secret Sea" in many ways, just aimed at a bit older audience.

I read many of White's books as a "pre-teen" but never read this one, as I could never find it. I ran across it at our local library, and was happily surprised how enjoyable it was reading a "new" White book as an adult. Like most Robb White books in this day and age, it will be hard to find (not as hard as some of the early ones tho), but its worth a look if you liked his other works.

Good
It is a good book.Read it.Very interesting and fun too!

Great but confussing
This book was very good. It was very complex and made you think a lot. It was an odd book but I like odd books. I gave it four stars because it was confussing and hard to understand. But overall it was great. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (3)

The Theater of the Absurd Strikes Again!
"The Dumbwaiter" (1957) is a long one-act play by Harold Pinter displaying his Theater of the Absurd traits, but in a more tightly focused view than in some of his other work. Ben and Gus are waiting in a play reminiscent of Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" (1952). They are like Estragon and Vladimir in the Beckett play except those two hapless souls are still waiting.
Ben and Gus are sticking around to do a job, something sinister, apparently a killing, but these two hit men, if that's what they are, are rather pathetic. There's an antipathy between the two. They have revolvers. In the claustrophobic set, a basement room, the two men get cryptic and hilarious food order notes from the dumbwaiter up above. They send up little snacks that Gus had brought with him (the food proves to be unsatisfactory). A speaking tube also connects them with whomever. Ben is the leader, and his cohort Gus seems like a fumbling clownish oaf.
As usual the dialogue has its comic riffs, repetitiveness and inanity. The two petty criminal are under the direction of a boss just as Goldberg and McCann were in Pinter's "The Birthday Party".
What happens is puzzling and baffling in this dark comedy. There is an undertone of violence with terror lurking. Neither character is quite sure of anything. Things are unnerving, uncertain, and menacing. The unknown is often scarier than the unknown. In a Pinter play people don't seem to be able to exert their wills; they are manipulated and toyed with just as Pinter is manipulating and toying with the audience.
It has been said that Pinter's characters lack sympathy for each other, spirituality or any craving for it. It's an existential world. The evil presence offstage must be obeyed. It's a mystery within an enigma, but fun for adventurous theatergoers.

You get a bit out of your depth sometimes, don't you?
One review, until now, is pathetic. This book, featuring two of the absurd, menacing, weighty master's early works is terrific.

The Caretaker, along with The Homecoming, The Birthday Party and Old Times is one of Pinter's best, ultimately important, works. It is in my opinion one of the great post-WWII English plays.

The Dumb Waiter, similar to The Caretaker in it's setting and brother-like characters, while being a long one-act, is creepier still and more enigmatic.

The Caretaker is about a vagabond named Davies, who is taken into a run-down room in a run-down house by Aston, who lives there, and collects things in it, and is the brother of Mick, who owns the building. Initially the relationship between Davies and Aston is kind, generous and progressive. Davies, used to trudging through life homeless is taken aback at the trust and goodwill offered by Aston. When Mick arrives later, Davies must feel out the differing attitude, as Mick looks after his brother, and isn't so easily trusting of the ragged and scruffy Davies. But eventually Aston seems odd (and delivers an amazing monologue testifying to his possible insanity), and Mick more level headed, and both at different times offer Davies a job in the house, as Caretaker.
But Pinter being Pinter, the goodwill is possibly unreal, or something else entirely. There is a vague confusion to the play, a lack of specifics, and the characters, in classic masculine style, only say what they think they need to, i.e.:

Davies: What do you do-? What do you do...when the bucket's full?
Pause.
Aston:Empty it.
Pause.

Davies, somewhat boxed into the house by weather and possibility never knows his place, as the brothers, who rarely are in the room together, keep him off balance. The truth becomes elusive, as do the facts. One never knows one's place, or how each feels about the other. A scary moment comes when Davies, flustered by the erratic behavior of Aston, calls him "nutty" to his brother, Mick. To which Mick replies: "You get a bit out of your depth sometimes, don't you?"

The Dumb Waiter is more absurd then The Caretaker. Two guys, possibly hitmen, possibly waiters, staying in a basement room, awaiting orders to do something, must contend with a dumb waiter that begins to descend with notes requesting food. The room clearly not a kitchen, and they not sure what is going on upstairs, instead put the little food they have in the dumb waiter, which ascends and descends several times. The trapped nature of Gus and Ben lends that Pinter menace to the story. Each has a gun, and seems ready to kill. But a lack of information, either known to them, or expressed by them so we know, keeps the lid on the proverbial pot.

These both are classic plays. I highly recommend this book.

The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter, 2 wonderful reads!
Both of these works are wonderful in the sense of making the reader think.Not only are you thrust head first into the plays, but your perception is what makes the endings.Pinter's stlye, form and intellect deliver in bothof the works and are challenging without being difficult.Both works havecharacter that people can relate to, wonderful dialogue, and mentalinvolovement. I highly recommend both works! ... Read more

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"Old Times" was first presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, London, on 1 June 1971. It was revived at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in July 2004. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

That Old Black Magic Has...
In reading Pinter's "Old Times" (1970) one gets the feeling that much of the novelty of the Theater of the Absurd has worn thin. Pinter's work seems far less of a breakthrough than it once did. Then we were engrossed by what was new and novel, but now new realities, new trends and the return of old trends have appeared. Today's theater is less cerebral, less demanding, more facile and superficial--just as it was before the Theater of the Absurd was in its heyday. Perhaps audiences have been lulled back to sleep.
Psychologically this play is still interesting because it deals with time and memory in an unfamiliar manner. Kate and Deeley are married living away from the London. Kate's old friend Anna is visiting after twenty years. We are faced with ambiguities and gnawing questions. Were Anna and Kate lovers in the past? Did Deeley know Anna in the past? When the play first begins is Anna really in the room? And what does borrowed underwear have to do with the eroticism evident in the play? Is Pinter manipulating us? Playing with us?
The play begins with Absurdist questions and dialogue with some real nonsense lines. Pinter is interested in words, their true meanings, and silences. Some familiar lyrics from old songs are sung by Deeley and Anna such as "Blue moon, I see you standing alone..."
Deeley is apparently a movie director or someone connected with movies. At one point he says he's Orson Welles. There's a lot of mystifying behavior and conversation in the play.
The play has the usual Pinteresque suspense and sense of menace, but it's more obscure, opaque. Why are we uneasy, disturbed by what is occurring? For Deeley the two women seem to merge into one. Does Anna ever show up at all or is it really just Deeley and Kate? Does Anna still exist? This play has one of Pinter's most enigmatic closing scenes.

old times baby
I believe that this play is very well written.Just like Pinters other plays, he has added an element of comedy to it, yet omits the "real ending" leaving you to imagine what happens after the lights go down.Harold Pinter and be closely compared to Samuel Beckett, they both refuse to give explanations of the characters or endings.I recommend this book if you like to use your imagination.

My second meeting with Pinter (spoilers, kinda)
This was my second Pinter play, and I must say that I enjoyed Old Times much more than The Homecoming, which felt too unpleasant.

There is no plot to speak of, but it has three enigmatic characters (one male, two females) who discuss events in the past.This really doesn't belong in the 'theatre of the absurd' category, but one can call it a 'nominal comedy', along the same lines as Albee's A Delicate Balance, because everything is the same at the end as the beginning.

The reason this play works is due to Pinter's growing control over his characters and the complete brilliance he has in his situational writing.He doesn't write of plots, but he raises somany questions.The fact that none are answered is really of no consequence.It is a difficult play, but a rewarding one.

Appreciating the absurd
"Old Times" isn't about a story because there really isn't one.It's about the idea of memory being relative.It's about the basics, three people left to discuss the real or not so real past.I think anyone could read this play and appreciate it. Keep an open mind and don't be too preoccupied with "what happened".

Not For Everyone
This book is a member of that series of plays called "theatre of the absurd."For the most part, the average reader will not understand what's going on.The play deals with one married couple and a visitor whojoins and leaves the action of the scene periodically.This is aboutreminiscing the past and interpreting it.The main focus is how people cannot communicate with one another. The more you read it, the more youunderstand it, but it is very subjective.Only mature readers andtheatrically-educated people will appreciate it. ... Read more

Product Description
A moving testament to one of the literary world's most celebrated marriages: that of the greatest playwright of our age, Harold Pinter, and the beautiful and famous prize-winning biographer Antonia Fraser.

In this exquisite memoir, Antonia Fraser recounts the life she shared with the internationally renowned dramatist. In essence, it is a love story and a marvelously insightful account of their years together, beginning with their initial meeting when Fraser was the wife of a member of Parliament and mother of six, and Pinter was married to a distinguished actress. Over the years, they experienced much joy, a shared devotion to their work, crises and laughter, and, in the end, great courage and love as Pinter battled the illness to which he eventually suc­cumbed on Christmas Eve 2008.

Must You Go? is based on Fraser’s recollections and on the diaries she has kept since October 1968. She shares Pinter’s own revelations about his past, as well as observations by his friends. Fraser’s diaries—written by a biographer living with a creative artist and observing the process firsthand—also pro­vide a unique insight into his writing.

Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser lived together from August 1975 until his death thirty-three years later. “O! call back yesterday, bid time return,” cries one of the courtiers to Richard II. This is Antonia Fraser’s uniquely compelling way of doing so. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

Multi-faceted and intriguing memoir
Antonia Fraser's high quality writing, amply demonstrated in her many historical and fictional works, is definitely maintained in this autobiography. Though the 'journal entry' style of much of the book may not be appealing to all, the picture she paints of a complex relationship, with brilliant and multi-talented partners, vividly sets forth many different situations, emotions, and conflicts. It is an intriguing look at the author and her partner, thought-provoking and from intense to light-hearted.

Much more than a love story
Confession time:I knew nothing of Antonia Fraser before receiving this book, and when I saw the very attractive blonde on the cover, I jumped to, now in retrospect, an idiotic conclusion; i.e., good looking wanna-be celebrity marries famous author to accomplish her goal.I ordered this book to learn more about Harold Pinter, having seen and read a good many of his plays, which I considered interesting, but at times also rather off-putting.Yes, I did learn a great deal about Pinter, so much so that I have a stack of his plays and other writings on hand, both new and old, which I hope to begin reading soon, and now with better understanding.

But even more, this book opened my eyes to its author, Antonia Fraser, someone I found to be a truly remarkable woman.Her humor, wit, intelligence and, above all, her beautiful soul, is an inspiration.And while her journal reveals a glamorous lifestyle most of us will never experience, that pales beside the extraordinary love these two shared.

And, it goes without saying, I will soon try to erase my abominable ignorance of her own prize-winning English and French histories as these books join my Pinter stacks.

This is an extraordinary book one should not miss.

A love story, not a pathography
Reading Lady Antonia Fraser's "Must You Go?: My life with Harold Pinter," I thought it critic-proof. Lady Antonia, a distinguishes biographer of royalty and writer of detective stories, writes elegantly and palpable love for her partner from 1975 until his death on Christmas Eve 2008, Nobel Prize for Literature winner Harold Pinter. There is every evidence that they remained deeply in love and insofar as anyone except the one who is dying can face decline and death, they faced it together.

Insofar as the diaries that the widow mixed with memoirs, the Pinter household was a happy home, lacking the menace that pervades his pre-Fraser plays, both the domestic dramas through "Betrayal" (based on a long-running affair of Pinter's with BBC journalist Joan Bakewell, first staged in 1978). She has said that the increasing focus on social injustice was not from her influence but from the change from an unhappy, complicated personal life to a happy, uncomplicated one.

Pinter and Fraser were prominent, vivacious members of the cultural elite. He directed plays and consorted with celebrity actors and actresses professionally and socially. I don't think that chronicling this is "name-dropping." Novelist Anthony Powell was her godfather. Peggy Ashcroft, Alan Bates, Tom Courtenay, Michael Gambon appeared in plays his wrote and/or directed. The fatwah against Salman Rushdie was the major cause celèbre for writers in the middle of the book's span of years, etc.

Both Fraser and Pinter enjoyed time in New York City, not just with Americans but away from the London gutter press. I guess there is cricket in NYC, but he played and followed it fervently back in England. The strong criticism of torture and military occupation by the Bush administration was not, Fraser takes care to document form diary entries, part of distaste for America/Americans. Rather they had been "Philamerican going back to WWII when we children knew the American soldiers had come to save us ". (BTW, they both voted Tory in the election that brought Margaret Thatcher to Downing Street, but suffered buyer remorse as it were.)

Pinter was struck down by cancer in 2002. Though its progress was halted, he never recovered his health, and had to videorecord the lecture (Art, Truth, and High Politics) for the 2005 Nobel Prize. Fraser writes with grace and eloquence of the half dozen years of increasing debility.

Throughout the book, the scrupulous historian quotes documents (primarily her diary) from the time, separating her current interpretations. Perhaps some readers were expecting a pathography, "pinteresque" or not. What the book delivers is the story oflove that lasted a third of a century and was ended only by death. Lady Antonia does not wear her heart on her sleeve or wail. She endeavors to tell a love story of mutuality and supportiveness, and I think succeeds admirably.

Memoir of an Unlikely Love Affair and Long Marriage
"Must You Go?" is by Lady Antonia Fraser, British author of many popular biographies of historical, frequently female figures, best-known, perhaps, Mary Queen of Scots, and Marie Antoinette: The Journey; and a brief detective series featuring Jemima Shore, television news presenter.Lady Antonia is the daughter of a well-known literary family, known as, alternatively, the Pakenhams, or Longfords, who are almost as famous as the Mitford sisters of the 1930s.The book at hand is a memoir of her unlikely 33-year love affair/marriage with Harold Pinter, CH, CBE, internationally known British actor/playwright/screenwriter/theater director/left-wing activist and poet.(Lady Antonia mentions within this book that he turned down a knighthood.)

Pinter was among the most influential British playwrights of the twentieth century. In 2005, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His writing career spanned over 50 years; he produced 29 original stage plays, 27 screenplays, many dramatic sketches, radio and TV plays, poetry, one novel, short fiction, essays, speeches, and letters. His best-known plays include "The Birthday Party" (1957), "The Caretaker"(1959), "The Homecoming" (1964), and "Betrayal" (1978), each of which he adapted to film. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include "The Servant" (1963), "The Go-Between" (1970), "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981), "The Trial" (1993), and "Sleuth" (2007). He also directed almost 50 stage, television, and film productions; furthermore, he acted extensively in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works. Mind you, his works were widely considered avant-garde, not particularly easily accessible, and were not necessarily universally beloved.At any rate, Pinter died on Christmas Eve, 2008.

An unlikely romance? Pinter was Jewish, an East End boy, son of immigrants, and she was very much a daughter of the establishment.And, when they met, each had been married for eighteen years: he to Vivien Merchant, widely-esteemed actress, they had one child.She, to Hugh Fraser, Scottish Member of Parliament, they had six.But the couple clicked immediately, and went on to make a life together, enjoying each other's work, their battles to better the world, their international travels."Must You Go?" based on the diaries the author kept during the time, is funny, tender, intimate: a love story, a sketch of two creative artists at work, and of British bohemian high society.

The largely chatty, informally-written book surely drops a lot of names, mostly without explanation, unfortunately, and few will likely be known on this side of the Atlantic; even fewer to those substantially younger than the author.The author, Lady Antonia - and,in the book, she explains why she should be so addressed, not as Lady Fraser, or Pinter, or whoever--argues that she is not an establishment figure.She says she was raised in North Oxford - her father taught at the ancient, prestigious university there, Oxford, until he unexpectedly inherited family estates and a lordship.She did not, therefore, pick up the title of "Lady," until she was 30, she says, and adds that, by that age, she had been supporting herself in journalism and publishing for nine years.I've read at least Quiet as a Nun: A Jemima Shore Mystery (Jemima Shore Mysteries), her first Jemima Shore book, and found it too mild for my taste.If you are interested, it was filmed for British television, and is buried in ARMCHAIR THRILLER, SERIES 10.JEMIMA SHORE INVESTIGATES was a 12 episode TV series, also quite mild, made in 1983.Each is only spottily available, perhaps most available on Amazon's sister UK site. Sofia Coppola based her recent film Marie Antoinette on Lady Antonia's book of the same name.

Of course, as Lady Antonia reaches her husband's final, long illness, which he bravely fought, her memoir gets much more serious and moving.But earlier on, she does quote a charming little poem she wrote to him, about the game of bridge, which they mutually loved:

FOR MY PARTNER

You're my two-hearts-as-one
Doubled into game
You're my Blackwood
You're my Gerber
You're my Grand Slam, vulnerable
Doubled and redoubled
Making all other contracts
Tame.
November 27, 1983.

Well, more years ago now than either Lady Antonia or I would like to recall, before she'd even met Pinter, I did interview her for an American newspaper, and found her, as you can surely guess, attractive, charming, and personable.And she gave me a great line that I suppose she'd successfully used before, that resulted in the interview's selling itself to further publications, including "Readers' Digest."She found, she said, that she benefited from the "after all" theory.People would say that perhaps her books were not the greatest.But, after all, she did have six children.Others might say that the six children were not the best-behaved; but after all, she did write books.Lady Antonia has raised six children and written many books.This one has been a best seller in the United Kingdom; it may not be that widely-appreciated on this side of the pond, but is worth a try if you like this kind of thing.

Disappointing
I love Antonia Fraser's works ... along with her contemporary, Allison Weir. I enjoy learning about England's historical figures as her writing is not dull or boring like a lot of biographers are.

Then why is her personal memoir such a dullard? I couldn't even finish the book because my eyes were crossing every time she would mention so and so eating at the same restaurant that she was at or so and so was admiring of her husband, Harold. That is all that I've managed to gleam so far. To think I was expecting something more intimate and personal especially since both Harold and Antonia were married to other people at the time of their meeting. I didn't expect a celebrity gush of confidentialty but did expect something more than just a daily note of going out to eat and having dinner with famous people.

If I wanted to read something like that, I would have picked up US Weekly or whatever the gossip rags are. I wanted to read more about the author and why she writes the stuff she writes and about her marriage to what was obviously her soul-mate. I wanted to know what she was thinking during that stormy time when her husband and Harold's wife first found out about their affair. I wanted to know what the children thought of the affair. I wanted to know why they were still happily married years long after. It is not common for affairs that lead to marriage stay happy or couples staying together for another 30 years.

If she did mention that in this book, I was too bored to get beyond the first half of the book to find out. What a shame. She really is a talented writer. But not when it comes to writing about her own life.

9/23/10 ... Read more

Product Description
The first in the collected plays of Harold Pinter, this volume contains his first six plays, spanning the years between 1957 - 1960, as well as two short stories written before he turned to the theatre. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The beginning of the "political" and some of his finest work
HAROLD PINTER: PLAYS 4 includes all of the superb dramatist's plays from 1978's "Betrayal" to 1996's "Ashes to Ashes." It marks the end of his more "traditional" pieces and ushers in the era of his concern, sparked by the horrors of El Salvador and Turkey, for human rights abuses and government oppression.

The opening play, "Betrayal," is one of Pinter's most innovative works. Each act of the play takes place chronologically before the previous, resulting in a backward hunt for the source of an adulterous relationship. While ostensibly about adultery, the play really deals with the various kind of betrayal that human beings face: betrayal to friends, betrayal to family, and even betrayal of self. "A Kind of Alaska" is an idiosyncratic play based on Oliver Sacks's novel AWAKENINGS which treats a woman's cure from sleeping sickness. It is one of the most enigmatic of Pinter's plays, and I still do not feel as if I get it.

With "Mountain Language," Pinter created his first overtly political piece. "Mountain Language" is without partisan bias or personal attacks, and doesn't even try to present an opposing voice, it simply introduces a setting of harrowing totalitarianism and allows oppressive rule to prove itself evil. In "The New World Order" and "Party Time," Pinter shows oppression occuring in the democratic first world among the upper-middle class, precisely where one would not expect it, in order to make the spectator or reader think about his nation's contributions to oppression. But Pinter's playwriter remains intensely focused on personal actions; by the volume's final play, "Ashes to Ashes," national policy really isn't really what's being attacked, but it instead forms the mere backdrop for an exploration of individual Man's cruelty to his fellow human being.

If Pinter's politics leave you displeased, this fourth volume of his collected plays is not for you. But for play-lovers who think that with his political engagement Pinter has entered a brilliant second phase of his playwriting life, HAROLD PINTER: PLAYS 4 is a must-have. ... Read more

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Harold Pinter was one of the world's leading and most controversial writers, and his impact and influence continues to grow. This Companion examines the wide range of Pinter's work - his writing for theatre, radio, television and screen, and also his highly successful work as a director and actor. Substantially updated and revised, this second edition covers the many developments in Pinter's career since the publication of the first edition, including his Nobel Prize for Literature win in 2005, his appearance in Samuel Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape and recent productions of his plays. Containing essays written by both academics and leading practitioners, the volume places Pinter's writing within the critical and theatrical context of his time and considers its reception worldwide. Including three new essays, new production photographs, five updated and revised chapters and an extended chronology, the Companion provides fresh perspectives on Pinter's work. ... Read more

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The Frankfurt School?s discourse on modernism has seldom been linked to contemporary drama, though the questions of aesthetics and politics explored by T.W. Adorno and others seem especially germane to the plays of Harold Pinter, which span high and low cultural forms and move freely from hermetic modernism to political engagement. Examining plays from 1958 to 1996, Varun Begley?sHarold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism argues that Pinter?s work simultaneously embodies the modernist principle of negation and the more fluid aesthetics of the postmodern.

Pinter is arguably one of the most popular and perplexing of modern dramatists writing in English. His plays prefigured, then chronicled, the crumbling divide between modernism and its historical ?others:? popular entertainment, politically committed art, and technological mass culture. Begley sheds new light on Pinter?s work by applying the methods and problems of cultural studies discourse. Viewing his plays as a series of responses to fundamental aesthetic and political questions within modernism, Begley argues that, collectively, they narrate a prehistory of the postmodern.