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.
Harold Pinter Books
October 10, 1930 – December 24, 2008
Harold Pinter stands as one of the most influential playwrights of modern times. His works are distinguished by theatrical pauses and silences, comedic timing, irony, and menace. Pinter's dramas often feature intense conflicts among ambivalent characters vying for verbal and territorial dominance, as well as for their own versions of the past. His thematically ambiguous plays delve into complex issues of individual identity oppressed by social forces, language, and the vicissitudes of memory.
This revised edition of Harold Pinter's Plays 4 features his latest play, Celebration, and highlights Pinter as a leading figure in British drama during the latter half of the twentieth century, as noted by the Swedish Academy in his 2005 Nobel Prize citation.
Pinter Plays. 3
- 247 pages
- 9 hours of reading
The second volume of Harold Pinter's collected work includes The Caretaker. The CaretakerIt was with this play that Harold Pinter had his first major success.
Betrayal is Pinter's latest full-length play since the enormous success of No Man's Land. The play begins in 1977, with a meeting between adulterous lovers, Emma and Jerry, two years after their affair has ended. During the nine scenes of the play, we move back in time, through the states of their affair, with the play ending in the house of Emma and Robert, her husband, who is Jerry's best friend.The classic dramatic scenario of the love triangle is manifest in a mediation on the themes of marital infidelity, duplicity, and self-deception. Pinter writes a world that simultaneously glorifies and debases love.
Various Voices
- 224 pages
- 8 hours of reading
Although best known for his plays, Harold Pinter has also written an extensive and wide-ranging body of other work since 1948; prose, prose fiction, poetry and political writings. In this anthology Pinter presents his own selection, among which are A Note on Shakespeare (1950), a paean to the cricketer Len Hutton (1969), the short stories Kullus (1949) and Girls (1995), the poetry from School Life (1948), and political pieces - including many letters to the press - on the United States, Cuba, Kurdistan and Nicaragua.
The Birthday Party, and The Room
- 120 pages
- 5 hours of reading
In "The Birthday Party", a musician becomes the victim of a ritual murder. Everyone implacably plays out the role assigned to them by fate. "The Room" becomes the scene of a visitation of fate when a blind Negro suddenly arrives to deliver a mysterious message.
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 Foster. All four inhabit a no-man's-land between time present and time remembered, between reality and imagination.
