Harold Pinter, página 2 de 5

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.

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.

This volume contains the complete short plays of Harold Pinter from The Room, first performed in 1960, to Celebration, which premiered in 2000.The book commemorates the tenth anniversary of the playwrights death and coincides with Pinter at the Pinter, a celebratory season staging twenty of his one-act plays at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London, 2018. With a foreword by Antonia Fraser. The foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century. Swedish Academy citation on awarding Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize in Literature, 2005.

Stanley Webber is visited in his boarding house by strangers, Goldberg and McCann. An innocent-seeming birthday party for Stanley turns into a nightmare.The Birthday Party was first performed in 1958 and is now a modern classic, produced and studied throughout the world.

The 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 Times

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.

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

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.

This is the first important revival of a piece disgracefully undervalued when it appeared 13 years ago. Harold Pinter has admittedly written more forcefully; but none of his plays, not even The Caretaker or Old Times, has the emotional density of Betrayal. As David Leveauxs wary production confirms, 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. What upset the reviewers in 1978 was subject matter that seemed annoyingly futuristic. The plot harked back to a theatrical period when dramatists were obsessed by love-triangles which, if not eternal, were certainly interminable. Yet since the story started after a mans affair with his best friends wife had finished, ended with its beginning, and in between lopped this way and that through time, Betrayal was also dismissed as gimmicky. The answer is that Pinters narrative method takes "what next?" out of the spectators mind 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, the 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. Even by Pinters standards, those politics become pretty intricate. For instance, we learn early on that the old friend, Robert, has known for years of his wife Emmas affair. She knows he knows, but her lover Jerry does not know he knows or that she know he knows. See what I mean? A lunch between the two men, Jerry fake-innocently asking after Emma, Robert seeing through the ruse yet humouring him, seethes with unexpressed guilt and anger. Almost all the plays encounters are similarly charged. It is like watching Kasparov circle Karpovs queen, not knowing when, how or if he will pounce.

At the heart of this second volume of Harold Pinters collected work is The Caretaker, the play with which he 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 book, which has an introduction by the playwright himself, also includes two television plays, The Collection and The Lover, and several other shorter pieces from the same period.