Harold Pinter Plays 1 (Contemporary Classics)

a real masterpiece, The Hothouse, I mean. It was written more than 50 years ago, and it didn't loose any reference with our life. A real metaphor of power and the power of beaurocracy. It remind me to Orwell 1984. May I remind here a nice application of Kindle? During a week end in London (May 2013)with my wife, we saw that Hothouse was on stage at Trafalgar Studio Theater. We love Pinter, but we didn't know this play. I ordered it on my Kindle; I got it in one minute; I had the time to read it in the next hour; than we were to the theater enjoing the performance without loosing any subtlety of the text. Great!Carlo Erminero

There have been more than 110 Nobel laureates in Literature, but for the most part humor isn’t their distinguishing feature. Some do have occasional touches of humor in their writing -- Doris Lessing, Orhan Pamuk, Gabriel García Márquez and, in a leaden way, possibly Saul Bellow. But fewer than a handful have really made humor essential to their work. The most obvious is Dario Fo (1997), who proudly calls himself a clown; but little of his work has been translated into English, and that not always so well. Most poems by Wislawa Szymborska (1996) feature her wonderfully ironic sense of humor, but they're more likely to provoke a smile than laughter out loud. [Sorry her name is misspelt: Amazon's character set is limited.] And Samuel Beckett’s (1969) humor is inseparable from tragedy and peculiarly limited language.So it probably falls to Harold Pinter — a generation younger than Beckett, influenced by him, and ultimately his personal friend — to be the funniest Nobel laureate (2005), at least for readers of English. Pinter’s plays are often serious, or at least disturbing. His humor is often quite dark or sarcastic. But his plays are built with it -- it's fundamental to their structure. It’s more aggressive than Beckett’s, more overtly satirical, and sometimes purely playful or farcical, Pythonesque before Monty Python. (I defy anyone to read aloud “Trouble in the Works” in Vol. 2 of this series without cracking up the first few times through.) And while seeing a Pinter play performed is better than reading one, there is plenty on the printed page that’s entertaining and thought-provoking.For each of the past four years I’ve read one volume from this Faber series of Pinter plays over the New Year’s holiday. This series, especially with the 1997 edition of Vol. 3 and the 2012 edition of Vol. 4, is more complete than the so-called “complete works” from Grove Press. Each volume is prefaced by the text of a short speech Pinter gave that touches on some of the works in the book, but aside from some notes about the first two or three productions of each play there aren’t any endnotes or other critical or explanatory apparatus. I can’t say I connected with all of it; in particular “The Dwarfs” (1961, Vol. 2), a condensation for radio of a novel Pinter wrote in the 1950s, and with a key character eliminated, was obstinately opaque. But cycling through all his work this way helped me to start each year with laughter. It's a brief tradition that will be hard to replace.

In "A Slight Ache" (1958) Harold Pinter was still trying to get his sea legs, experimenting, trying things out, probing. In this effort he has only two speaking characters, Edward and Flora, and one mute character, The Matchseller. At breakfast the couple are having an Absurdist, inane conversation about prosaic matters such as the garden. It's often funny stuff. It turns out that a Matchseller has been standing for months outside in all kinds of nasty weather in the lane behind their house where there is no traffic. Edward has grown quite frightened of this person, and, of course, wants him gone. Flora, somehow attracted to the stranger, invites him in. He's dirty, smelly, and his matches are a sodden mess, but somehow she's sexually attracted by him. Edward prattles on to the man at great length and manages to convey little except the futility and meaninglessness of his (Edward's) own existence. The more he talks, the more vapid, superficial, and inconsequential his life seems. To Pinter identity, individuality is a very fragile thing. Does the Matchseller represent death, rebirth, fate, change, or basically nothingness. Pinter can be annoying, prickly, and also dull and boring. You may see echoes of Ionesco ("The Killer") and Beckett in this one. Prior to this Pinter had written "The Room," "The Birthday Party" and "The Dumbwaiter." This play along with others has that underlying sense of menace, an impending disaster, but it is less interesting and even more claustrophobic than the others. Keep your eye out for the Absurdist swap, sometimes a weird switcheroo. If this were the only play on a theater bill, I would advise customers not to pay too much for their tickets and to expect periods of the boring doldrums. I know and appreciate my Pinter, but this one is not one of his better outings. One of Pinter's goals in these early plays was to depersonalize his characters, suck the humanity out of them, make them automatons. They had certain traits, but they were portrayed as types, templates rather than individuals, real people. They acted robotically, lacked spirituality, were puppets, and merely existed. As theatergoers you either accepted this often comic depersonalization, or you rejected it. Of course a movement like the Theater of the Absurd was bound to gradually lose its appeal because it drained humanity and individuality from the characters. The audience went on to other movements or back to naturalism and realism. Look elsewhere on Amazon for my reviews of other titles in this collection.

I bought this for my niece thinking it was something to do with Harry Potter, but it's actually Harry Pinter. Needless to say my niece was quite disappointed as she was expecting magic and wizards and suchlike but got menacing pauses and underlying threats in run down boarding houses in seaside towns.Spoiler alert: Bumbledore dies at the end.

The Birthday Party was Pinter's first major play, and after a disastrous premiere soon established itself as a modern classic. The other plays in this volume are no less rewarding. The dialogue is a stunning achievement, inconsequential on the surface, but richly suggestive underneath -- of a world that is simultaneously absurd and menacing, and of characters who do not wish to communicate, and would not be able to, even if they wished. The heredity, through Beckett and Ionesco, all the way back to Maeterlinck, is manifest. Realism and symbolism are brilliantly combined.But isn't it about time that Faber and Faber did Pinter more justice? The volume is in a rigid binding that easily cracks, the paper is of poor quality, the print is thick and nasty, and the price is exorbitant -- though fortunately Amazon and its dealers are offering the book at well below the publisher's price. But surely the time has come for Faber and Faber to issue a new Collected Pinter, in the handsome format that is surely due to one of the greatest of English dramatists.

Early Pinter seems so assured and confident-a rare confidence and consummate skill throughout this collection preparing the way for the subliminity of his middle period encapsulated in the majestic Homecoming !

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