The Short Plays of Harold Pinter

by Harold Pinter

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 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.

Genres: Plays

928 pages, Paperback

Published August 6, 2019

About the author

Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993) and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.

Reviews

[Rhys · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has been a very long time since I read a book more than 900 pages long. But I raced through this, stunned and awed by how excellent the plays are. More than forty years of Pinter's genius are contained between these covers. Pinter is absolutely in my top three playwrights of all time. He might even be in my top one.

Really, I find it difficult to fully express how impressed I am by these short absurdist works that are neither comedies nor tragedies but something else, unique creations. I have read elsewhere that Pinter's earlier work is more menacing than his later, but I found all of these plays to be menacing without exception, and nearly all of them had strong (sometimes outrageous) comedic elements too. As narratives I generally didn't understand them. I mean that I didn't understand them directly. The meanings always seemed oblique, existing behind the action of the plays themselves, and I saw or felt allusions that maybe weren't intended by the author (or maybe they were).

For instance, the play 'Mountain Language' is about a tyrannical regime's oppression of a rural minority. This play could be an account of any oppression of any minority peoples by a violent government. I read it as an allegory about the British treatment of Mau Mau prisoners in the 1950s and I don't know why that interpretation in particular occurred to me. The fact of the matter is that the play is a general account, a core theme, that can be applied to any real life variation. And there are dozens or hundreds of such nasty sordid real life variations in the the recent history of the modern world.

There are many such plays here about tyranny and authority. In most of them, the tyrannical regime appears to be one with puritanical 'moral' views, a twisted ethical system. In others, the authority isn't necessarily that of a state, but of an organization, of a company, of a landlord, of circumstances, even of stilted social customs.

There are strong echoes of Beckett in Pinter's style and this is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned, because Pinter knows exactly what to do with the techniques that Beckett evolved.

The early play 'The Dumb Waiter' is absolutely one of my favourites. The absurdity is extremely acute, the claustrophobia extremely constraining, the character interactions extremely menacing. It is a work of genius. But such a statement runs the risk of being unfair to all the other plays (and there are 23 in total). All are works of genius. I was delighted to see that the ones near the end of this monster volume were just as great, just as funny, just as alarming, just as absurd as the earlier ones, and that Pinter lost no force whatsoever as he approached the end of his career. 'Moonlight' and 'Celebration', the final two plays, are utterly sublime and completely beautifully deranged.

The best book of plays I have ever read.

Or at least it's a joint winner with the Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett.

[The Scribbling Man · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a big reader of plays, but I'd like to change that. This collection was bought for me with the intent of me reading a particular Harold Pinter play that, as it happens, isn't contained in the collection. Ah well. I've been dipping in and out for a few years and I've loved most of what I've read. Absurdism in many forms has often turned me off, but for whatever reason, Pinter's brand of social eccentricity works for me. Sometimes the plays here seem impenetrable, but most remain compelling regardless, and nearly all of them are entertaining. I typically prefer his early social satires to some of the more abstract, non-linear experiments that he favoured in his later years, but I think that lies more with my capacity for unravelling the themes than anything to do with Pinter.

Anywho, I'm sure I'll come back to some of these and I will almost certainly need to check out some adaptations. Recommendations welcome.