Harold Pinter

Si Dante pren Virgili com a guia per a la seva travessia poètica, Pinter s'endinsa en el particular descens als inferns contemporanis que es "Terra de Ningú".

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 TimesFirst 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.

This volume contains Harold Pinters first six plays, including The Birthday Party.The Birthday Party Stanley Webber is visited in his boarding house by two strangers, Goldberg and McCann. An innocent-seeming birthday party for Stanley turns into a nightmare.Mr Pinters terrifying blend of pathos and hatred fuses unforgettably into the stuff of art.Sunday TimesThe Room and The Dumb Waiter In these two early one-act plays, Harold Pinter reveals himself as already in full control of his unique ability to make dramatic poetry of the banalities of everyday speech and the precision with which it defines character.Harold Pinter is the most original writer to have emerged from the "new wave" of dramatists who gave fresh life to the British theatre in the fifties and early sixties.The TimesThe HothouseThe Hothouse was first produced in 1980, though Harold Pinter wrote the play in 1958, just before commencing work on The Caretaker. In this compelling study of bureaucratic power, we can see the full emergence of a great and original dramatic talent.The Hothouse is at once sinister and hilarious, suggesting an unholy alliance of Kafka and Feydeau.Spectator

This volume contains a selection of early works by Harold Pinter. In the title play, everything in Floras garden is lovely, and would be for Edward too, if it were not for the slight ache in his eyes and the mysterious matchseller at the gate. This edition also includes A Night Out, The Dwarfs and several revue sketches.

You remind me of my uncles brother. He was always on the move, that man. Never without his passport. Had an eye for the girls. Very much your build. Bit of an athlete. Long-jump specialist. He had a habit of demonstrating different run-ups in the drawing-room round about Christmas time. Had a penchant for nuts.In a dilapidated house in West London, three men - kind but damaged Aston, the shambling tramp he invites to stay, and Astons violently unpredictable brother Mick - fall into an unsettling and darkly funny tussle for power.The Caretaker was first performed at the Arts Theatre, London, in April 1960.Theres such craft and concision to Pinters depiction of a triangular territorial battle in a run-down West London attic that it still sets the bar inspirationally high. The play is both of its period and timeless, conveying the wider human condition in its tightly particular evocation of hardship and dispossession, its dialogue so wryly attuned to the way ordinary speech can be loaded and weaponised that it even got its own classification: "the comedy of menace".Daily TelegraphA modern classic, a spiritual shocker, tough, cruel and brutally funny . . . Pinter transfixes the modern human condition in which people are both intruders and prisoners, aggressors and victims, pushers and fantasists. This is your life.Sunday Times

Arts, Truth and Politics is Harold Pinters lecture on receipt of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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 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 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-mans-land between time present and a time remembered, between reality and imagination.No Mans Land was first presented at the National Theatre at the Old Vic, London, in 1975, revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, with Harold Pinter as Hirst and revived by the National Theatre, directed by Harold Pinter, in 2001.

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

A restaurant. Two curved banquettes. Its a celebration. Violent, wildly funny, Harold Pinters new play displays a vivid zest for life. In The Room, Harold Pinters first play, he reveals himself as already in full control of his unique ability to make dramatic poetry of the banalities of everyday speech and the precision with which it defines character. Harold Pinters latest play, Celebration, and his first play, The Room directed by the author himself, premiered as a double-bill at Londons Almeida Theatre in March 2000.

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

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.Old Times is a joyous, wonderful play that people will talk about as long as we have a theatre.New York TimesWhat am I writing about? Not the weasel under the cocktail cabinet . . . I can sum up none of my plays. I can describe none of them, except to say: that is what happened. This is what they said. That is what they did. Harold Pinter

An exultant night - a man in total command of his talent.ObserverThe most intense expression of compressed violence to be found anywhere in Pinters plays.The Times When Teddy, a professor in an American university, brings his wife Ruth to visit his old home in London, he finds his family still living in the house. In the conflict that follows, it is Ruth who becomes the focus of the familys struggle for supremacy.

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.

Various Voices is the only collection of Harold Pinters prose, poems and political writing to span his career. This new edition includes a remarkable interview in which he reflects on his time as an evacuee in Cornwall during the Second World War, as well as new prose, poems and his Nobel Speech.

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

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

Harold Pinter can sketch a world in a few lines which reveal the power of his vision focussed on the horrors that have been and that are to come.

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