Product Description
Jack Kroll in Newsweek has called Harold Pinter "the most fascinating, enigmatic and accomplished dramatist in the English language." Since his first full-length play, The Birthday Party (1958), and continuing with The Homecoming (1965), Pinter has trained a sharp eye on the strange dynamics of modern family life. In his newest play, Celebration, he continues to examine the darker places of relationships. Celebration is an acerbic portrait of a sated culture choking on its own material success. Startling, full of black humor and wicked satire, Celebration displays a vivid zest for life. Also included in this volume is Pinter's classic play The Room ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Don't Count Him Out
American playwrights have a tendency to fizzle out. Miller, Albee, Williams fit the bill. Their best work came early on, and they spent the rest of their lives trying to earn enough to maintain the lifestyle. Pinter looked ready to join the ranks of the has-beens. After a dazzling start, his work began to grow more obscure, perhaps more precious. Pinter's claim to fame, after all, came with his ability to capture the stark brutality of the English working class; his ear for the obscene banter of everyday life made him a stand out in the era of kitchen sink drama. Then came years of elite living and an increasingly T.S. Eliot-like metaphysical tone. "Celebration" takes one back to the old Pinter. It is quite simply the most beautifully wrought piece of satire to appear since Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest." It is, as they say, wickedly funny. It is published here for sentiment, one supposes, along with an early piece, where one gets the old Pinter: kitchen sink all right, but lots of menace and mystery. It's a nice juxtaposition and a fine intro to Pinter''s world, old and new.

A 2000 play mixed with his first play from 1957
This book, published in 2001 around the time of the playwright's 70th birthday and a bit of a retrospective, contains two plays by Harold Pinter. The first is "Celebration", first presented in 2000, and the second is Pinter's first play "The Room", dating from 1957.

The comedy "Celebration" comes as a bit of a change of pace after the very intense "political" plays Pinter wrote from 1985 to the turn of the millennium. Riotously funny, it is set in "the best restaurant in Europe" with the stage divided into two tables. At one, Lambert and his brother Matt dined with their wives, Julie and her sister Prue, celebrating the anniversary of Julie and Lambert. At the second table, Suki chats with his wife Russell. As the play progresses, the characters get progressively more drunk, make appalling revelations without realizing it, divulge their infidelities, and yet stay oddly content and glad-hearted. Among the tables roam Richard and Sonia, the owners, and a hilarious intrusive waiter. It has been a long time since I read a Pinter play that made me laugh out loud (unless it was the laugh of shock and outrage at revelations in his political works), and enjoyed "Celebration" immensely.

"The Room" was written when Pinter was still squarely in the genre of theatre of the absurd. Rose, a sixty-something housewife, muses about who's living in the basement flat of her building, talks incessantly to her taciturn husband, and encounters a young couple interested in the room to let. At the end of the play Riley, a "blind negro" enters and brings a surprising message to Rose, resulting in the play's shocking ending. While I found the ending compelling, most of the play is fairly tedious; the very length of the play is a mark of the young writer's immaturity, since mature Pinter is quite compressed. Still, worth checking out as the beginning of a very entertaining career.

A Master of Words and Social Comentary
Harlod Pinter's Celebration is a work of biting genuis. His darkly comic look on today's society makes the play a standout in a sea of banal work in the theatre world. No American Playwright today comes close to his skill level. If you want to read well crafted theatre, you need to read Celebration and his earlier work The Room.

An Instant Classic!
If you are a follower of Pinter, you will love this book because itcontains both the first and latest Pinter's plays. Celebration is writtenthis year (2000) while The Room was written way back in 1957. For the newPinter's fan, this is also an ideal book to be introduced to the greatplaywright of our time. Like most of his plays, these two plays should beread slowly, paying close attention to their witty dialogues. This isdefinitely one of the best drama book to come out this year. ... Read more

Product Description
Representing Pinter's own selection of his non-dramatic writings, this volume includes pieces of poetry and prose up to 1990 and ranges back to the earliest piece, "The Kullus", which was written when he was 19 years old. ... Read more

Product Description
This play was first performed in 1960. Harold Pinter specializes in the tragicomedy of the breakdown of communication, broadly in the tradition of the theatre of the absurds and this is demonstrated in both "The Caretaker" and "The Birthday Party". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Technique Without Inspiration in This One
"The Caretaker" (1960) has some of Pinter's typical Absurdist features, but this three-act three character play seems less interesting, less involving, more rambling and talky than his other early work. It has the same claustrophobic seedy one-room he has used before, but his three people don't make contact with us and involve us. Two brothers, Aston and Mick, seem to share a room or a house. Mentally-challenged Aston brings home Davies, a derelict, and sets him up as a quasi-caretaker of the property. Davies has trouble with his inadequate shoes, just as does a character in "Waiting for Godot" by Beckett, Pinter's mentor
We get so much talk, jabbering and background information from Davies and Aston that we eventually tire of it. Aston had been institutionalized because of his mental condition and been given shock treatments. At one brief moment of the play, Davies suggests he has been confined in such a place. Sinister acting Mick menaces and threatens Davies so Davies pulls a knife to protect himself.
In other plays Pinter was able to get audience or readers interested in the characters because of their quirkiness and the feeling of puzzles within enigmas, but in this play he bores us because he lets it go on too long. The set is depressing which only emphasizes the tedious and stultified nature of the characters.
Each of the three seems to be a dodgy type. Mick seems to be unsavory, Davies is shiftless and seems on the run, and Aston is not playing with a full deck. Davies and Aston tell a lot about themselves; Mick remains more of a mystery. They all talk in circles and repeat things. At times Mick talks like a catalog of interior design.
Mick, too, engages Davies as a caretaker, but then they have a territorial squabble. The tables are turned. Later Davies tries to assert himself and throw out Aston.
A very humorous attack is launched by Mick who claims that Davies said he was an interior decorator. Then both brothers want Davies out.
The Pinteresque pauses that he became famous for seemed to begin in this play. Davies says to Aston, "You must be off your nut." Exits and entrances are weird in this play.
In this play Pinter goes awry, with all technique and little inspiration.

Pinter as the poor bloke's Beckett
With this play which was first produced in 1960 Pinter became a well- known and admired dramatist. It is still considered one of his finest plays. It is the story of three character, Davies, an elderly wanderer who has been saved by the middle- aged Aston and brought into the home he shares with his brother Mick. The three characters in the course of the play talk at length and reveal their own respective characters. There isa sense of menace and threat in the relationships- and there is much focusing on trivialities of everyday life. The play in short is Pinteresque though it static quality, absurdity and illogic make it somewhat difficult to get a hold on.
There are fine, and at times funny passages in the work. The down- and-out Davies who also goes by the name of Jenkins is frequently taunted by the younger brother Mick. Mick dreams of the apartment being elaborately restored. The middle brother Astin who has undergone shock treatments is often fragmented and broken. The play is filled with attacks on the major characters. .
I have never been a big fan of the Theatre of the Absurd (Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter) and when I do like it it is because of the beautiful, lyrical passages which in my feeling Becket particularly excels in. For me Pinter is not bad, but far indeed from the status of writer whose works we would like to return to again and again.

Will There Ever Be A Caretaker?

Harold Pinter was born in London in 1930. In 1995 he won the David Cohen British Literature Prize, awarded for a lifetime's achievement in literature.

On 30 May 1960, the play was presented by Michael Codron and David Hall at the Duchess Theatre, London, with the following cast:
Mick, a man in his late twenties: Alan Bates
Aston, a man in his early thirties: Peter Woodthorpe
Davies, an old man: Donald Pleasance

This is the story of three men. Mick is the proprietor of a shabby house in West London. Aston, his brother, is always busy with something but never accomplishes anything. Finally there is Davies, some kind of a hobo, adopted by Aston who gives him a place to sleep and - after a while - asks him if he wants a job as the caretaker. Davies is very reluctant and finds petty excuses to postpone the decision of becoming the caretaker.

As the story unfolds, you ask yourself if anything will ever change and if anything important will ever happen ('No Exit' by J.P.Sartre comes to mind: four persons who will have to suffer each other for Eternity).

The most impressive part of the play is the monologue by Aston in which he tells how he was treated with electro-shocks when he was a kid. This is one of the most gruesome parts I know in modern theatre.

A final remark: when you read (or listen to) this play, you will soon find out that one of the most attractive parts of this play is the very lively and humorous dialogue

great suspense
Thrillingly suspenseful. The pages just seem to keep coming with excitment. Gunn henderson was a great character. The caretaker himself was a mastermind amazing character. Loved every minute of it. Only thing wrongis getting what you want! ... Read more

Product Description
In the early 1970s Harold Pinter joined forces with director Joseph Losey and Proust scholar Barbara Bray to develop a screenplay of Proust's masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past. Pinter took more than a year to conceive and write the screenplay and called the experience "the best working year of my life." Although never produced, Harold Pinter's The Proust Screenplay is considered one of the greatest adaptations for the cinema ever written.

With fidelity to Proust's text, the screenplay is an extraordinary re-creation by one of the leading playwrights of our time. It is, in its way, a unique collaboration between two extraordinary writers united across more than half a century and two different cultures by a special concern for time and memory. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

The Eyes of Marcel
The Proust Screenplay is an imaginative and entertaining read that can be enjoyed whether or not you have traversed the pages from Swann's Way to Time Regained. In this condensed form you get a heightened sense of the dramatic action of the novel- its scandals, seductions, and heartbreaks- with Pinter's characteristic dark humour throughout. And the screen directions read like absolute poetry.

Surprisingly convincing
Summarizing Marcel Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu" is often seen as a hopeless endeavour, an undertaking so absurd it fit in perfectly with Monty Python humour and the reader must still be content with extracts of some passage or another unless he dares conquer the whole seven-volume masterpiece. In 1972, Nicole Stephane, who held the film rights to Proust's work, asked Joseph Losey if he would like to work on a film version. Losey turned to Pinter to write the screenplay, and THE PROUST SCREENPLAY was written over the following year.

The screenplay covers all of the Recherche, Pinter rejected any attempt to select one or two volumes as the center. The dramatic arc is twofold: on one hand the narrator moves toward disillusion in his personal life, but on the other hand all that has been lost (ultimately Time itself) is regained and then preserved permanently in the narrator's writing. The screenplay consists of 455 scenes, and just to give an idea of how compressed the narrative must be, the entire opening of "A la cote du chez Swann" up to "Un Amour de Swann" is represented in just fifteen pages of sparse script. But even with such trims, it is said that a film resulting from the screenplay would be about five hours long.

The action shifts among eras from scene to scene. Marcel sees M. Vinteuil's daughter and her lover in 1893, and in the next scene Albertine is telling him in 1901 of her esteem for the couple. Many scenes are single images. Scenes 134 and 135 are only of Saint-Loup looking at a photograph, 136 is only of an empty dining room in a hotel, and then 137 is of a band of girls on a cliff top in Balbec. However, there is a considerable amount of substantial dialogue here, especially in the tortured relationship of Marcel and Albertine. Of course, as this is a dramatic work by Pinter, we find the infamous "Pinter pause", but generally the voice is that of Proust, not the grim English playwright.

What a pity this film was never made. Although the common cinephile who has never read the Recherche wouldn't know the backstory of all characters and events, the film would still be a moving experience. For lovers of Proust's masterpiece, the screenplay is an opportunity to consider several portions of the novel in a new light due to Pinter's often relevatory telescoping of the story. At least the screenplay was printed and made widely available. If you've never read Proust, read him! And if you like the Recherche and are curious about a dramatization, do check out Pinter's creation.

Surprisingly convincing
Summarizing Marcel Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu" is often seen as a hopeless endeavour, an undertaking so absurd it fit in perfectly with Monty Python humour and the reader must still be content with extracts of some passage or another unless he dares conquer the whole seven-volume masterpiece. In 1972, Nicole Stephane, who held the film rights to Proust's work, asked Joseph Losey if he would like to work on a film version. Losey turned to Pinter to write the screenplay, and THE PROUST SCREENPLAY was written over the following year.

The screenplay covers all of the Recherche, Pinter rejected any attempt to select one or two volumes as the center. The dramatic arc is twofold: on one hand the narrator moves toward disillusion in his personal life, but on the other hand all that has been lost (ultimately Time itself) is regained and then preserved permanently in the narrator's writing. The screenplay consists of 455 scenes, and just to give an idea of how compressed the narrative must be, the entire opening of "A la cote du chez Swann" up to "Un Amour de Swann" is represented in just fifteen pages of sparse script. But even with such trims, it is said that a film resulting from the screenplay would be about five hours long.

The action shifts among eras from scene to scene. Marcel sees M. Vinteuil's daughter and her lover in 1893, and in the next scene Albertine is telling him in 1901 of her esteem for the couple. Many scenes are single images. Scenes 134 and 135 are only of Saint-Loup looking at a photograph, 136 is only of an empty dining room in a hotel, and then 137 is of a band of girls on a cliff top in Balbec. However, there is a considerable amount of substantial dialogue here, especially in the tortured relationship of Marcel and Albertine. Of course, as this is a dramatic work by Pinter, we find the infamous "Pinter pause", but generally the voice is that of Proust, not the grim English playwright.

What a pity this film was never made. Although the common cinephile who has never read the Recherche wouldn't know the backstory of all characters and events, the film would still be a moving experience. For lovers of Proust's masterpiece, the screenplay is an opportunity to consider several portions of the novel in a new light due to Pinter's often relevatory telescoping of the story. At least the screenplay was printed and made widely available. If you've never read Proust, read him! And if you like the Recherche and are curious about a dramatization, do check out Pinter's creation.

Pinter takes a stab
Harold Pinter's screenplay of Proust's novel is commendable. It does not try to cram too much in, but instead relies on a more imagistic adaptation. Raoul Ruiz's recent movie "Time Regained" wasn't dissimilar--although named after the last volume, it really drew from the whole work. However, I have to feel that even so, it was of little interest to those not familiar with the novel. I think a movie based on Pinter's screenplay, as good as the screenplay is, would suffer the same fate. It would be a visual tone poem for the Proust fan, capturing one thing but leaving out a dozen others. The meat of the novel is in the narration, and I'm afraid the best way to translate it to the screen would be through a miniseries, even a regular series. It's the only medium that stands a chance at duplicating the scope of the novel. One has to remember that its great length is no accident, it helps constitute the very nature of the story. Pinter ought to expand his screenplay, like Proust expanded his early drafts of the recherche, to give a greater impression of the time lost, and give it to the BBC or something.

Too bad this was never made into a movie.
A screenplay of Proust's In Search of Lost Time sounds like a hopeless project.In the most recent translation, Proust's novel ran to over 4,000 pages.Reducing this to a screenplay would seem to require cuts of such magnitude that nothing of the novel would be left.Indeed, those movies that have been made of the novel usually are of a small part, like the Swann in Love section of Swann's Way.Pinter, however, managed to pull off the impossible.He concentrated on key events in the novel, and even more on key images.It is hard to say whether this would have worked with someone totally unfamilar with the material.However, presenting Proust's novel in any literal fashion would be impossible, and probably contrary to what he attempted to accomplish in his novel.Pinter's screenplay, for anyone who has read the novel, is a tremendous success.Unfortunately, it was never made into a movie. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

Clueless Fascination
A well-established member of the Absurdist Theatre tradition, Pinter pulls no literary punches in this, his only novel.For those who know of his plays' stark ambiguity and pointed pointlessness, this novel will be nothing too new.Pinter is a man of thematic contradictions, someone who elucidates the morals and meanings of senseless with the tools of obsfucation and slyly crafted symbolism.He has a point -- he always does -- but those points are always disguised, usually as themselves, and so his work is never what it seems to be.

You either have patience for Pinter, or you don't, and part of what most lovers of Pinter go for is the translation of his work onto the stage by living actors with some measure of skill.Pinter's work is of life, despite how surreal it always may seem, and it finds its greatest expression in the medium of flesh and blood.

Therefore, this novel falls short in some ways, most notably in that it is only alive as much as the reader's own imagination is, and given the smoke screens and philosophical fogginess that permeates the text, it is likely that readers will run high on impatience before they do on understanding.

However, for those careful and delicate literature lovers with the time and focus necessary for the task, Dwarfs is a densely layered and methodically crafted tale of common lust and betrayal mixed with some rather heavy-handed but finely wielded philosophy.Sometimes the writing delves into repetitious, monochromatic, self-aggrandizement, but this is usually just the knee-jerk aspect of Pinter's play-work marring the novelistic medium.In general though, he gains a lot of ground with this book, even if, by the time you're done reading, you're not sure where you've ended up. ... Read more

Product Description
Conversations with Pinter ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Illuminating contextualization
In a series of interviews between 1971 and 1993 Gussow (longtime _New York Times_ drama critic, who also coaxed a fascinating set of comments from Tom Stoppard) got Pinter to talk about how he works. Pinter refuses to commenton what his work "means," but is eager to clear the air aboutmisperceptions about himself (such as being in a chronic state of outrage).Pinter comes across as generous as well as politically committed,suspicious of audiences, but grateful to (fellow) actors. And he clearlyhas a sense of humor (too rarely appreciated in his plays). ... Read more

Product Description
One of a series concerning the major plays of leading 20th-century playwrights. This guide introduces, explores and analyzes in detail the principal themes and styles of the work of Harold Pinter. It also places it in the context of modern theatre, and includes a select bibliography. ... Read more

Product Description
The only comprehensive guide to the plays of one of the world's greatest yet most puzzling contemporary dramatists, The Pinter Ethic penetrates the mystery of Harold Pinter's work with compelling and authoritative insights that locate and disclose the primal power of his drama in his characters' powerplay for dominance. With remarkable clarity, Penelope Prentice's close reading of Pinter's work untangles the multiple ambiguities, complex conflicts and contradictory actions which continue to baffle, bewilder, and confound critics and audiences. She reveals that Pinter's plays reflect not a vision of postmodern hopelessness in a world threatening to self-destruct, but provoke unguessed choice and action that enlarge the concept of love and link it to justice. Offering a definitive analysis of Pinter's work--from his early poetry, fiction, interviews, essays and novel The Dwarfs to his most recent play Celebration--Prentice demonstrates why Pinter's work can only be communicated through drama where attitude and intention may count for little, but where action is all. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (3)

Pinter is Punting Again
"The Hothouse" (1958) Harold Pinter's fifth play, was not produced until 1980. Largely farce and black comedy, it takes place in a mental institution where the staff cares so little about patients that they are only known by numbers. Patient No. 6457 has recently died, and Patient No. 6459 gives birth; the father is probably a staff member. We never meet any of the patients in this full-length play. Roote is the boss, and Gibbs is his second-in-command. Miss Cutts is the only female character.
As usual there are funny bits, almost like vaudeville gags, and mainly Absurdist dialogue. Roote is an insensitive supervisor, and the seven characters act robotically with very little humanity on display. When we listen to some of the dialogue by the minders of the mentally disturbed, we wonder if the tables haven't been turned.
Roote's morality and statements about staff members having affairs with patients is strange to say the least. "I don't mind the men dipping their wicks on occasion. It can't be avoided...It does no harm to either party...Never ride barebacked and always send in a report."
Gibbs and Cutts "torture" attendant Lamb with electrodes and ask a series of inane, farcical questions. Almost everything in the play is weird and off the wall. Who runs the nut house? Why, of course, the real nut cases. The play shows Pinter's fascination with words, the frequent nonsense and meaninglessness of words.
In one scene Roote keeps throwing whiskey in the face of the character Lush. Roote feels he is going to be murdered, and the play takes a sinister turn; again, the introduction of menace a la Theater of the Absurd. The play ends on a very grim, frightening note.
As the play progresses, it becomes less successful as a dramatic work. Pinter pulls out all the stops and doesn't quite knit it together. It gets too sensational without getting very meaningful. We need not ask of it, as a Theater of the Absurd piece, to be sensible, but we would like it to be significant. Black comedy, but a lot of shock for its own sake. Shock your audience but do it for a point or a purpose. Like Kafka it has a nightmare quality and a loss of contact with reality. It is not one of Pinter's better works, manipulative not deeply felt or successfully executed.

not received
I ordered The Hothouse on 7th July and today, August 24, have still not received it.

Harold Pinter's most kafkian drama
This drama is a nightmare made for the theater. We don't know, and it isn't really important,if this is a political,social,existential satire or what; we can but gaze in horror at the poor victims of a bunch of demented wardens.All is shown like in an unreal light, as in a lucid dream. And moreover, this gloomiest of dramas is also uncannily funny. Creepiest Pinter's Play. ... Read more

Product Description
Another Off-Broadway success by one of the theatre"s most inventive and versatile writers. A subtle blending of artful nuance, veiled menace and zany humor. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Pinter's Finest
"One For The Road" marks a major departure for Harold Pinter, providing readers and theatregoers with a theatrical experience that is riveting and unnerving.I have directed this play several times and have always found it to be a goldmine of writing.The language is exact, offering clear and distinct motivation from the characters, yet the play allows ample room for interpretation. Though it concerns the events of political torture--it is much more than that.It is subtle in its examination of power, corruption, and the apparent ease of destroying one's soul.I have had the "interrogator" played by both a man and a woman; the results were always the same: anyone can destroy a person's life with only words.The physical torture in the play happens offstage, but the punishment of the characters is performed in front of our eyes by the interrogator's words.It is one of the most violent moments in theatre.It is classic Pinter.A true masterpiece. As a side note: The US version of "One For The Road" contains a glaring ommision in the text.Early in the text the interrogator speaks of the victims eyes.There is a small speech that he makes about the viewing the soul of one's eyes.This speech is missing two, very crucial lines that are in the English text, but missing from the US version.This is not a change by Pinter, but a publishing error by Grove.This explains a rating of "8" since the text is incomplete. ... Read more

Product Description
Volume 4 of the collected plays of Harold Pinter, this book includes three full length plays which he wrote in the 1970s, "Old Times", "No Man's Land" and "Betrayal". Also included are "Monologue", "Family Voices", "One For The Road", "A Kind of Alaska", "Victoria Station" and "Mountain Language". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

"A Slight Ache" Not Pinter's Best Effort
In "A Slight Ache" (1958) Harold Pinter was still trying to get his sea legs, experimenting, trying things out, probing. In this effort he has only two speaking characters, Edward and Flora, and one mute character, The Matchseller. At breakfast the couple are having an Absurdist, inane conversation about prosaic matters such as the garden. It's often funny stuff. It turns out that a Matchseller has been standing for months outside in all kinds of nasty weather in the lane behind their house where there is no traffic. Edward has grown quite frightened of this person, and, of course, wants him gone.
Flora, somehow attracted to the stranger, invites him in. He's dirty, smelly, and his matches are a sodden mess, but somehow she's sexually attracted by him. Edward prattles on to the man at great length and manages to convey little except the futility and meaninglessness of his (Edward's) own existence. The more he talks, the more vapid, superficial, and inconsequential his life seems. To Pinter identity, individuality is a very fragile thing.
Does the Matchseller represent death, rebirth, fate, change, or basically nothingness. Pinter can be annoying, prickly, and also dull and boring. You may see echoes of Ionesco ("The Killer") and Beckett in this one.
Prior to this Pinter had written "The Room," "The Birthday Party" and "The Dumbwaiter." This play along with others has that underlying sense of menace, an impending disaster, but it is less interesting and even more claustrophobic than the others. Keep your eye out for the Absurdist swap, sometimes a weird switcheroo. If this were the only play on a theater bill, I would advise customers not to pay too much for their tickets and to expect periods of the boring doldrums. I know and appreciate my Pinter, but this one is not one of his better outings.
One of Pinter's goals in these early plays was to depersonalize his characters, suck the humanity out of them, make them automatons. They had certain traits, but they were portrayed as types, templates rather than individuals, real people. They acted robotically, lacked spirituality, were puppets, and merely existed.
As theatergoers you either accepted this often comic depersonalization, or you rejected it. Of course a movement like the Theater of the Absurd was bound to gradually lose its appeal because it drained humanity and individuality from the characters. The audience went on to other movements or back to naturalism and realism.
Look elsewhere on Amazon for my reviews of other titles in this collection.



... Read more

Product Description
These two short plays, which show a new directon in Pinter's work, are accompanied by a short piece, "Night". His other plays include "The Caretaker", "The Birthday Party", "Old Times" and "No Man's Land". ... Read more