Pinter in Play


Book Description

Pinter in Play provides a survey of diverse readings of the Harold Pinter canon organized around and presented in terms of the major critical schools of the past twenty-five years, from New Criticism to deconstruction to poststructuralism. Reflecting on the cultural, personal, sociological, and philosophical contexts of these diverse critical perspectives and the critics who express them, this book is equally about the act or the art of literary criticism and itself an important work of literary criticism. Drawing on interviews with Pinter scholars, Susan Hollis Merritt shows how critics "play" with Pinter and thereby seriously enforce personal, professional, and political affiliations. Cutting across traditional academic and nonacademic boundaries, Merritt argues that greater cooperation and collaboration among critics can resolve conflicts, promote greater social equity, and foster ameliorative critical and cultural change.




The Birthday Party, and The Room


Book Description

In "The Birthday Party", a musician becomes the victim of a ritual murder. Everyone implacably plays out the role assigned to them by fate. "The Room" becomes the scene of a visitation of fate when a blind Negro suddenly arrives to deliver a mysterious message.




No Man's Land


Book Description

“An oblique comedy of menace, unsettling, exquisitely wrought and written . . . a complex excursion into the by now familiar Pinter world of mixed reality and fantasy, of human worth and human degradation.” —New York Times Set against the decayed elegance of a house in London’s Hampstead Heath, in No Man’s Land two men face each other over a drink. Do they know each other, or is each performing an elaborate character of recognition? Their ambiguity—and the comedy—intensify with the arrival of two younger men, the one ostensibly a manservant, the other a male secretary. All four inhabit a no man’s land between time present and time remembered, between reality and imagination—a territory which Pinter explores with his characteristic mixture of biting wit, aggression, and anarchic sexuality.




The Caretaker and the Dumb Waiter


Book Description

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.




One for the Road


Book Description




The Essential Pinter


Book Description

Presents selections of the work of playwright Harold Pinter. Includes key plays, poetry, and the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature lecture.




The Birthday Party


Book Description

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 caretaker


Book Description




Celebration ; And, The Room


Book Description

Collects two hallmark plays by the Nobel Prize-winning author: "Celebration" first performed in 2000 and his first play, "The Room," first performed in 1957.




The Room


Book Description

Rose and Bert rent a room that might almost be a paleolithic cave; the outside is terrifying and unknown. Rose never goes out, Bert only goes to drive his van with furious aggression. A young couple call, and then a blind black man. Bert comes home, massive with triumph at smashing every car that challenged his van. Finding the stranger he kicks him to death and Rose goes blind.




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