Harold Pinter

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.

VARIOS

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.

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".

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.

"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 mind's 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 psyche's sly manoeuvres for self-respect with a sardonic forgiveness ...a master craftsman honouring his talent by setting it new, difficult tasks". (New Society). "There 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...Pinter's narrative method takes "what's next?" out of the spectator's 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 play's 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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