The Essential Pinter: Selections from the Work of Harold Pinter
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Harold Pinter is one of our most profound poets and pla...)
Harold Pinter is one of our most profound poets and playwrights, with work ranging from his plays The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal to such poems as "The Bombs" and "Death." A writer known for his searing exploration of power, Pinter gives us an electrifying look into the often uncomfortable relationships between people whether family members or political opponents. The Essential Pinter, which includes key plays, poetry, essays, and screenplays, is an indispensable companion for anyone wishing to delve into the astonishingly dazzling and frequently ominous world of Harold Pinter. In voyaging in, we not only come to fully appreciate the breadth of a body of work spanning over fifty years, but acquire a better understanding of human interaction.
The Caretaker and the Dumb Waiter (Pinter, Harold)
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Jacket description.back: In all of Pinter's plays, seem...)
Jacket description.back: In all of Pinter's plays, seemingly ordinary events become charged with profound, if elusive, meaning, haunting pathos, and wild comedy. In The Caretaker, a tramp finds lodging in the derelict house of two brothers; in The Dumbwaiter, a pair of gunmen wait for the kill in a decayed lodging house. Harold Pinter gradually exposes the inner strains and fear of his characters, alternating hilarity and character to create and almost unbearable edge of tension.
(Betrayal is Pinter's latest full-length play since the en...)
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.
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In an old and slightly seedy house in North London ther...)
In an old and slightly seedy house in North London there lives a family of men: Max, the aging but still aggressive patriarch; his younger, ineffectual brother Sam; and two of Max's three sons, neither of whom is married -- Lenny, a small-time pimp, and Joey, who dreams of success as a boxer. Into this sinister abode comes the eldest son, Teddy, who, having spent the past six years teaching philosophy in America, is now bringinghis wife, Ruth, home to visit the family she has never met. As the play progresses, the younger brothers make increasingly outrageous passes at their sister-in-law until they are practically making love to her in front of her stunned but strangely aloof husband.
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In The Birthday Party, a musician who escapes to a dila...)
In The Birthday Party, a musician who escapes to a dilapidated boarding house becomes the victim of a ritual murder in which everyone- assassins, victim, and observers- implacably plays out the role assigned him by fate.The Room, a derelict boarding house again becomes the scene of a visitation of fate when a blind Black man suddenly arrives to deliver a mysterious message.
Harold Pinter was a Nobel Prize-winning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor.
Background
Harold Pinter was born on October 10, 1930, the only son of a Jewish tailor, in Hackney, East London. At the age of 12, Pinter began writing poetry, and in spring 1947, his poetry was first published in the Hackney Downs School Magazine. In 1950, his poetry was first published outside of the school magazine in Poetry London, some of it under the pseudonym "Harold Pinta". He won a scholarship to the local school, Hackney Downs Grammar School.
Pinter enjoyed running and broke the Hackney Downs School sprinting record.
Education
In 1948 Harold Pinter entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but hated the school, missed most of his classes, feigned a nervous breakdown, and dropped out in 1949. In 1948 he was called up for National Service. He registered as a conscientious objector, was brought to trial twice, and was ultimately fined for refusing to serve. He had a small part in the Christmas pantomime Dick Whittington and His Cat at the Chesterfield Hippodrome in 1949 to 1950. From January to July 1951, he attended the Central School of Speech and Drama. and then joined a repertory company as an actor and toured England and Ireland.
Career
Later Harold Pinter began writing plays, giving up the poetry, short stories, monologues, and an autobiographical novel, The Dwarfs, that he would eventually publish in 1990.
In 1957 Pinter completed two one-act plays, The Room and The Dumb Waiter, as well as the full-length play The Birthday Party. The relationship of villain and victim emerges gradually in all three of these plays. In The Dumb Waiter two hired gunmen experience strange terrors while receiving orders delivered via a dumb waiter shaft until one performs the assigned task by killing the other. In The Birthday Party impulse and instinct war with repression on many levels as Stanley fences with his companions—motherly Meg; luscious Lulu; apathetic Petey; and his tormentors, the irresistible instruments of conformity, Goldberg and McCann.
Pinter adapted his radio play A Slight Ache (1959), about a wife who exchanges a stranger for her husband, from his short story "The Examination" and later made it into a stage play. He next wrote two revue sketches, Pieces of Eight and One to Another. Another radio play, A Night Out (1960), followed.
Pinter's first West End success was The Caretaker in 1960 (adapted for film in 1962). In it, a devious old tramp is befriended and sheltered in his cluttered room by the kindly Aston until his calculating brother ousts the would-be caretaker. Night School appeared on radio the same year, depicting two aunts mothering Walter as he pursues a tart who has rented his room while he has been in prison.
The Dwarfs, derived from Pinter's novel, also first appeared on radio in 1960. It presents a pair of threatening figures cruelly descending upon the hapless Len with his disintegrating fantasies about ghoulish dwarfs. Pinter later adapted two television plays for the stage: The Collection (1961), which expresses a husband's fears of his wife's infidelity with one of a pair of men in an adjoining apartment; and The Lover (1963), in which a jaded married couple seek sexual stimulus in role playing. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) broadcast his short story "The Tea Party" in 1964 and televised it throughout Europe the following year.
In Pinter's full-length play The Homecoming (1965) the theme of sexual cruelty reappears. A professor teaching in an American university returns to his father's home in London on summer vacation with his wife. She stays on as the mistress for his father and brothers, and he agrees to return to the United States alone.
BBC television produced Pinter's The Basement (originally a film script entitled The Compartment) in 1967. The following year he wrote three one-act plays: Landscape, an exchange of reminiscences in non-connecting monologues between two old people; Silence, which mixed a three-person monologue and dialogue in a kind of dramatic poem; and the funny sketch Night. His full-length drama Old Times (1971) has no plot; it is a play about the past. The three characters spend an evening reminiscing about events that may or may not have occurred.
In 1973 Pinter was made the Associate Director of the National Theatre, a post he would hold until 1983.
Pinter's early plays were labeled "comedies of menace" and occur in confining room sanctuaries, in which men, beset by robotizing social forces, surrender the remnants of their individuality. In his later plays he is especially concerned with what he regards as the nearly impossible task of verifying appearances. He creates images of the human condition that are despairing yet also comic in his deft handling of dialogue that attacks, evades communication, and shields privacy with debasing non sequiturs, pat clichés, repetitions, contradictions, and apt bad syntax. Pinter thinks of speech as "a constant stratagem to cover nakedness. " This period of his life became one of his most prolific. He contributed many works, some of which are: No Man's Land (1975), Betrayal (1978), Poems And Prose 1949-1977 (1978), I Know The Place (1979), Family Voices (1981), Other Places (1982), One For The Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), The Heat Of The Day (1989), Party Time (1991), Moonlight (1993), 99 Poems In Translation (1995), and Ashes To Ashes (1995).
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Jacket description.back: In all of Pinter's plays, seem...)
Views
Quotations:
I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on earth - certainly greater than sex, although sex isn't too bad either.
It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.
The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.
Membership
An Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and an Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Association of America (1970), Pinter was appointed CBE in 1966 and became a Companion of Honour in 2002, having declined a knighthood in 1996.
Connections
In 1956 Harold Pinter married Vivien Merchant. Pinter's first marriage dissolved in 1980. In the same year he married Lady Antonia Fraser.