Harold Pinter – författare

Harold Pinter's first and only novel, written in the early 1950s before he began writing plays. The novel is set in post-war London's East End, a landscape of bomb-sites, and describes the lives of four young Londoners whose energy and humour lift them above the routine austerity of the time.

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.

You remind me of my uncle's 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 Aston's 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.'There's such craft and concision to Pinter's 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 Telegraph'A 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

Teddy, a philosophy professor in an American university, brings his wife Ruth to visit his father, uncle and two brothers at his old London home, after years of estrangement. In the intense conflict that follows, it is Ruth who becomes the focus of their struggle for supremacy.'An exultant night - a man in total command of his talent.' Observer'The most intense expression of compressed violence to be found anywhere in Pinter's plays.' The Times'The Homecoming can be seen as a Freudian play about sons filled with subconscious Oedipal desires. It can equally be seen as an ethological study of a group of human animals fighting over territory. Precisely because Pinter never moralises about or resolves the situation, it is a play that, when impeccably acted, continues to haunt our dreams.' Michael Billington, GuardianThe Homecoming premiered at the Aldwych Theatre, London, 1965.

This volume contains a selection of early works by Harold Pinter. In the title play, everything in Flora's 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.

The second volume of Harold Pinter's collected work includes The Caretaker.The CaretakerIt 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 CollectionThis 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 LoverRichard 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 TimesThe volume also includes Night School and The Dwarfs, plus five revue sketches written during the same period.

This volume contains Harold Pinter's first six plays, including The Birthday Party.The Birthday PartyStanley 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 Pinter's terrifying blend of pathos and hatred fuses unforgettably into the stuff of art.' Sunday TimesThe Room and The Dumb WaiterIn 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 revised third volume of Harold Pinter's work includes The Homecoming, Old Times, No Man's 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 Homecoming'Of all Harold Pinter's major plays, The Homecoming has the most powerful narrative line... You are fascinated, lured on, sucked into the vortex.' Sunday Telegraph'The most intense expression of compressed violence to be found anywhere in Pinter's plays.' The TimesOld Times'A 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 Times'Harold Pinter's poetic, Proustian Old Times has the inscrutability of a mysterious picture, and the tension of a good thriller.' IndependentNo Man's Land'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

There is no writer who excels at the art of adaptation for the screen so much as Harold Pinter. His consummate skill and unerring ear for dialogue, coupled with his sensitivity and understanding of the work of other authors, make the three volumes of his screenplays (of which this is the first) a collective masterclass in screenwriting.Included in this collection are the screenplays for The Servant, The Pumpkin Eater, The Quiller Memorandum, Accident, The Last Tycoon and Langrishe, Go Down.

A restaurant. Two curved banquettes. It's a celebration. Violent, wildly funny, Harold Pinter's new play displays a vivid zest for life.In The Room, Harold Pinter's 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 Pinter's latest play, Celebration, and his first play, The Room directed by the author himself, premièred as a double-bill at London's Almeida Theatre in March 2000.

There is no writer who excels at the art of adaptation for the screen so much as Harold Pinter. His consummate skill and unerring ear for dialogue, coupled with his sensitivity and understanding of the work of other authors, make these three volumes a collective masterclass in screenwriting.Everyone who values the word and loves film will savour and enjoy this wide range of work with the distinctive Pinter hallmark.

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 Times'What 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

This revised third volume of Harold Pinter's work includes The Homecoming, Old Times, No Man's 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 Homecoming'Of all Harold Pinter's major plays, The Homecoming has the most powerful narrative line... You are fascinated, lured on, sucked into the vortex.' Sunday Telegraph'The most intense expression of compressed violence to be found anywhere in Pinter's plays.' The TimesOld Times'A 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 Times'Harold Pinter's poetic, Proustian Old Times has the inscrutability of a mysterious picture, and the tension of a good thriller.' IndependentNo Man's Land'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

'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 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.

Harold Pinter's Betrayal received its premiere at the National Theatre, London, in November 1978. After an initially guarded response from the critics, the work was rapidly reevaluated and won the Olivier Award for Best New Play the following year. Set in London and Venice the play has an innovative chronology that opens at the end of an affair and works its way backwards over nine years, from 1977 to 1968. It is widely considered one of the playwright's pivotal works.

The Room, The Dumb Waiter, A Slight Ache, A Night Out, Night School, The Collection, The Dwarfs, The Lover, Tea Party, The Basement, Landscape, Silence, Monologue, Family Voices, A Kind of Alaska, Victoria Station, One for the Road, Mountain Language, The New World Order, Party Time, Moonlight, Ashes to Ashes, CelebrationThis 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 playwright's 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.