Harold Pinter

In The Captive, Prousts narrator describes living in his mothers Paris apartment with his lover, Albertine, and subsequently falling out of love with her.

Unico romanzo del commediografo inglese, I nani e stato scritto nei primi anni'50, e poi abbandonato per quasi quarant'anni. Nel 1960 Pinter ne ha trattouna commedia e soltanto nel 1989 lo ha ripreso in mano, lasciandolosostanzialmente immutato, ma decidendo di pubblicarlo. E un testo denso edimpegnativo, che anticipa molti dei temi della produzione teatraledell'autore. Dominato dai dialoghi, discorsi fatti di salti, silenzi,argomenti abbandonati e ripresi, sullo sfondo della Londra cupa dell'East End,mette in scena quattro personaggi, tre uomini e una donna, alle presesoprattutto con la loro impossibilita di comunicare.

Le prime rappresentazioni delle opere di Harold Pinter furono letteralmente stroncate da quasi tutta la critica.Si scrisse che era un autore eccentrico, inaccettabile, incomprensibile, che non aveva nulla da dire. Oggi e forse l''autore vivente piu rappresentato al mondo ma, come lui stesso tiene a sottolineare: "Adesso sono diventato comprensibile, accettabile, eppure le mie commedie sono sempre le stesse di allora. Non ho cambiato una sola battuta!" In quest''opera sono raccolti i testi che hanno rivelato il drammaturgo inglese e ne hanno decretato poi il successo internazionale in quanto erede e continuatore di maestri come Beckett, Genet e Ionesco.

Nei primi mesi del 1972 Nicole Stéphane, che possedeva i diritticinematografici di "Alla ricerca del tempo perduto", chiede al regista JosephLosey se gli sarebbe piaciuto lavorare ad una versione cinematografica dellibro. E Losey ne propone la sceneggiatura ad Harold Pinter, gia suo strettocollaboratore per "Il servo", "L'incidente" e "Messaggero d'amore". Dopo averletto la "Recherche", nell'estate del 1972 Pinter compie numerosi viaggi inFrancia: a Illiers, a Cabourg, a Parigi, per "impregnarsi" dei luoghiproustiani. In novembre la sceneggiatura e terminata e, dopo ulteriori tagli elimature, agli inizi del 1973 la versione rivista e pronta e definitiva.

This revised third volume of Harold Pinters work includes The Homecoming, Old Times, No Mans Land, four shorter plays, six revue sketches and a short story. It also contains the speech given by Pinter in 1970 on being awarded the German Shakespeare Prize.The HomecomingOf all Harold Pinters major plays, The Homecoming has the most powerful narrative line... You are fascinated, lured on, sucked into the vortex.Sunday TelegraphThe most intense expression of compressed violence to be found anywhere in Pinters plays.The TimesOld TimesA rare quality of high tension is evident, revealing in Old Times a beautifully controlled and expressive formality that has seldom been achieved since the plays of Racine.Financial TimesHarold Pinters poetic, Proustian Old Times has the inscrutability of a mysterious picture, and the tension of a good thriller.IndependentNo Mans LandThe work of our best living playwright in its command of the language and its power to erect a coherent structure in a twilight zone of confusion and dismay.The Times

This revised third volume of Harold Pinters work includes The Homecoming, Old Times, No Mans Land, four shorter plays, six revue sketches and a short story. It also contains the speech given by Pinter in 1970 on being awarded the German Shakespeare Prize.The HomecomingOf all Harold Pinters major plays, The Homecoming has the most powerful narrative line... You are fascinated, lured on, sucked into the vortex.Sunday TelegraphThe most intense expression of compressed violence to be found anywhere in Pinters plays.The TimesOld TimesA rare quality of high tension is evident, revealing in Old Times a beautifully controlled and expressive formality that has seldom been achieved since the plays of Racine.Financial TimesHarold Pinters poetic, Proustian Old Times has the inscrutability of a mysterious picture, and the tension of a good thriller.IndependentNo Mans LandThe work of our best living playwright in its command of the language and its power to erect a coherent structure in a twilight zone of confusion and dismay.The Times

The Hothouse was first produced in 1980, though Harold Pinter wrote the play in 1958 just before commencing work on The Caretaker. The Hothouse is one of Pinters best plays: one that deals with the worm-eaten corruption of bureaucracy, the secrecy of government and the disjunction between language and experience. Michael Billington.The Hothouse is at once sinister and hilarious, suggesting an unholy alliance between Kafka and Fedyeau. The National Theatre presented a major revival of The Hothouse in July 2007. The foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century. Swedish Academy citation on awarding Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2005

The second volume of Harold Pinters collected work includes The Caretaker.The Caretaker It was with this play that Harold Pinter had his first major success. The obsessive caretaker, Davies, is a classic comic creation, and his uneasy relationship with the enigmatic Aston and Mick a landmark in twentieth-century drama.The play remains a masterpiece.Daily TelegraphThe Collection This one-act play for television explores the sexual manoeuvres between two couples in the clothing trade.Taps the adrenal flow of contemporary guilt and anxiety.TimeThe Lover Richard and Sarah conduct themselves with apparent respectability in the mornings, whilst living out a sequence of erotic rituals in the afternoons.Beautifully written... the sexiest play I remember seeing on the television.Sunday Times The volume also includes Night School and The Dwarfs, plus five revue sketches written during the same period.

Le prime rappresentazioni delle opere di Harold Pinter furono letteralmente stroncate da quasi tutta la critica.Si scrisse che era un autore eccentrico, inaccettabile, incomprensibile, che non aveva nulla da dire. Oggi e forse l''autore vivente piu rappresentato al mondo, ma come lui stesso tiene a sottolineare: Adesso sono diventato comprensibile, accettabile, eppure le mie commedie sono sempre le stesse di allora. Non ho cambiato una sola battuta!Nel primo volume sono raccolti i testi che hanno rivelato il drammaturgo inglese e ne hanno decretato poi il successo internazionale coronato dal Premio Nobel, in quanto erede e continuatore di maestri come Beckett, Genet e Ionesco; sono Il compleanno, La stanza, Il calapranzi, La serra e Il guardiano.Il secondo volume - che contiene anche alcuni ritocchi compiuti dallo stesso autore - comprende le commedie scritte tra il 1962 (The Lover) e il 1991 (Party Time). Dai capolavori della maturita, come Il ritorno a casa del 1964, e Terra di nessuno di dieci anni dopo, alle tragicommedie sulla menzogna dell''amore - L''amante, Vecchi tempi, Tradimenti - ai brevi drammi politici piu recenti - Il bicchiere della staffa, Il linguaggio della montagna, Party Time, in cui Pinter denuncia, con la consueta forza di ambasciatore di Amnesty International e di illustre rappresentante del P.E.N. Club inglese, torture, guerre, violazioni dei diritti umani e abusi di potere. Il volume e accompagnato dall''appendice Pinter in Italia e da una nota del curatore che da conto delle altre numerose arti di cui egli e maestro: regista, sceneggiatore, attore.

In The Homecoming there are five men in the family. Mum is dead. Their home is a vast open-plan North London living-room, working class tat in epic concrete: a magnificent structure by John Bury, furnished with a Welsh dresser painted Berlin-black and a smoky-cut armchair. The whole thing is in monotone blacks and greys, the colours of mashed newspapers and cigarette ash and old socks. Uncle Sam (John Normington), who holds the reins of the kitchen, is a diluted man who works as a chauffeur and has some dim sense of importance about taking his bosses to London airport. Dad is a retired butcher, played by Paul Rogers with a perfect grasp of the fact that half of the grating comic power of the dialogue comes from speaking a line against its surface meaning, roaring hatred when demanding a hug or vilifying his puny life when his words are apparently boasting about it.

Conocido mundialmente por sus intensas obras en donde el silencio y la amenaza están a cada momento a punto de romper en violencia, Harold Pinter (nacido en Londres en 1930 y Premio Nobel de Literatura 2005) ha sido tambien un prodigioso poeta, a pesar de una produccion relativamente modesta. Este volumen bilingue, que abre con un texto escrito en 1948 cuando el distinguido dramaturgo todavia cursaba el colegio, repersenta la seleccion mas compelta de una sorprendente obra poetica.

It was with this play that Harold Pinter had his first major success, and its production history since it was first performed in 1960 has established the work as a landmark in twentieth-century drama.The obsessive caretaker, Davies, whose papers are in Sidcup, is a classic comic creation, and his uneasy relationship with the enigmatic Aston and Mick established the authors individuality with an international audience.

Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes were presented as a double-bill at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in June 2001. Acclaim for Mountain Language:Extraordinarily economical and extraordinarily chilling.Sunday TelegraphAshes to Ashes:This dark, elegiac play, studded with brutally and swaggeringly funny jokes, is one of Pinters most haunting works.Sunday TimesAshes to Ashes is an extraordinarily powerful work: elusive, mesmeric, disturbing.Guardian

Betrayal is a new departure and a bold one . . . Pinter has found a way of making memory active and dramatic, giving an audience the experience of the minds accelerating momentum as it pieces together the past with a combination of curiosity and regret. He shows man betrayed not only by man, but by time - a recurring theme which has found its proper scenic correlative . . . Pinter captures the psyches sly manoeuvres for self-respect with a sardonic forgiveness . . . a master craftsman honouring his talent by setting it new, difficult tasksNew SocietyThere is hardly a line into which desire, pain, alarm, sorrow, rage or some kind of blend of feelings has not been compressed, like volatile gas in a cylinder less stable than it looks . . . Pinters narrative method takes "whats next?" out of the spectators and replaces it with the rather deeper "how?" and "why?" Why did love pass? How did these people cope with the lies, the evasions, the sudden dangers, panic and the contradictory feelings behind their own deftly engineered masks? The plays subject is not sex, not even adultery, but the politics of betrayal and the damage it inflicts on all involved.The Times First staged at the National Theatre in 1978, Betrayal was revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, in 1991. Twenty years after its first showing, it returned to the National in 1998.

A dark, elegiac play, studded with brutally and swaggeringly funny jokes.Sunday TimesA deeply poignant, raffishly comic, emotion-charged study of the gulf between parents and children and the anguish of approaching death... Beckett, the poet of terminal stages, inevitably comes to mind. What instantly moves one is Pinters image of a man confronting death in a spirit of rage, fear and uncertainty... The piss-taking Pinter humour and the undercutting of verbal pretence are all there. But what makes this an extraordinary play is that Pinter both corrals his familiar themes - the subjectiveness of memory, the unknowability of ones lifelong partner, the gap between the certain present and the uncertain past - and extends his territory. He shows, with unflinching candour, that in an age shorn of systems and beliefs we face "deaths dateless date" in a state of mortal terror.GuardianPinter has written few more fascinating plays.Times First staged at the Almeida Theatre, London, in September 1993, Moonlight was revived at the Donmar, London, in April 2011. The foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century. Swedish Academy citation on awarding Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2005

In The Captive, Prousts narrator describes living in his mothers Paris apartment with his lover, Albertine, and subsequently falling out of love with her.