The Hothouse

The Hothouse
Author: Harold Pinter
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
Total Pages: 76
Release: 1980
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780822205357

THE STORY: The scene is a government institution, possibly mental or medical and presumably penal, where the inmates are kept behind locked gates and are referred to by number rather than name. In charge is Roote, a pompous ex-colonel who is surely

Party Time ; And, The New World Order

Party Time ; And, The New World Order
Author: Harold Pinter
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 84
Release: 1993
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780802133526

Born in London in 1930, Harold Pinter holds an undisputed place in the front ranks of contemporary playwrights. These two plays, Party Time and The New World Order, work in chilling tandem, each demonstrating the inevitable brutality that comes with a total conviction of right. Party Time is a terrifying portrait of the culpable indifference of a privileged class, of the cruelty engendered in its members by political disruption, and of their merciless extinction of dissent. At an elegant cocktail party, a stylish bourgeoisie discusses country clubs and summer homes, while below in the streets a sinister military presence protects them from the unmentionable horrors of poverty, vulgarity, squalor. In The New World Order, two interrogators harass a man whom they condemn for his questioning of received ideas, and whom we know only as threat to their closed vision of democracy.

Harold Pinter's Politics

Harold Pinter's Politics
Author: Charles Grimes
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2005
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780838640500

Harold Pinter's Politics examines the expression of Pinter's political beliefs across every aspect and era of his artistic career. The fierce political stances of this important dramatist have been embodied in plays, screenplays, and his career as a theatrical director. Traditionally associated with absurdism, minimalism, and the dramatization of uncertainty, Pinter's name is now a byword for anti-authoritarian and anti-American politics. This transition has been in evidence from the earliest phases of his writing; all of Pinter's work emerges from his political views. His uniqueness as a political artist is that he is pessimistic about changing his audience or making it see its complicity in the horrors of the modern world. These horrors are dramatized through images of torture and oppression culminating in moments of silence that index the full extent of the destruction unleashed by the forces of power against dissidence.

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter
Author: William Baker
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2008-11-08
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0826499716

A succinct examination of Nobel prize-winner, Harold Pinter's creative output, providing introduction to drama (including theatre, film, TV and radio) and Pinter's letters prose and journalism.

Pinter's Female Portraits

Pinter's Female Portraits
Author: Elizabeth Sakellaridou
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1988
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780389207474

The book traces the development of Pinter's female characters both as dramatis personae and as theatrical functionaries. It explores a new exciting aspect of Pinter's work in the domain of character portrayal, and it supplies a kaleidoscopic view of Pinter criticism to date at home and abroad.

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter
Author: Basil Chiasson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2021-01-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350133655

This important book offers a thematic collection of critical essays, ideal for undergraduate courses on modern British theatre, on Harold Pinter's theatrical works, alongside new interviews with contemporary theatre practitioners. The life and works of Harold Pinter (1930–2008), a pivotal figure in British theatre, have been widely discussed, debated and celebrated internationally. For over five decades, Pinter's work traversed and redefined various forms and genres, constantly in dialogue with, and often impacting the work of, other writers, artists and activists. Combining a reconsideration of key Pinter scholarship with new contexts, voices and theoretical approaches, this book opens up fresh insights into the author's work, politics, collaborations and his enduring status as one of the world's foremost dramatists. Three sections re-contextualize Pinter as a cultural figure; explore and interrogate his influence on contemporary British playwriting; and offer a series of original interviews with theatre-makers engaging in the staging of Pinter's work today. Reconsiderations of Pinter's relationship to literary and theatrical movements such as Modernism and the Theatre of the Absurd; interrogations of the role of class, elitism and religious and cultural identity sit alongside chapters on Pinter's personal politics, specifically in relation to the Middle East.

Harold Pinter's Shakespeare

Harold Pinter's Shakespeare
Author: Charles Morton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2022-11-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000782271

This book charts the impact of Shakespeare’s works on Harold Pinter’s career as a playwright. This exploration traces Shakespeare’s influence through Pinter’s pre-theatre writings (1950-1956), to his collaboration with Sir Peter Hall (starting properly at the RSC in 1962 and continuing until 1983), and a late, unpublished screenplay for an adaptation of The Tragedy of King Lear (2000). Adding to studies of playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and James Joyce as significant influences on Harold Pinter’s work, this study aims to highlight the significant and lasting impact that Shakespeare had both formatively and performatively on the playwright’s career. Through exploring this influence, Morton gains not only a greater understanding of the shaping of Pinter’s artistic outlook and how this affected his writing, but it also sheds light on the various forms of Shakespeare’s continued influence on new writing, and what can be gained from this. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies.

Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power

Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power
Author: Marc Silverstein
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1993
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780838752364

For all their attempts to "own" language, Pinter's characters discover that words constitute alienable property; that language forms, de-forms, and re-forms subjectivity; that, as a system preceding the individual, language carries embedded within it the values, desires, and imperatives of the Other - the dominant cultural order. By introducing questions of subject position and ideology into his discussion, author Marc Silverstein shows how the plays exhibit a political dimension largely ignored by the bulk of Pinter criticism, which attempts to classify his oeuvre as a form of absurdist drama. It is Silverstein's contention that Pinter does not concern himself with the fate of the individual lost in an incomprehensible and meaningless universe (the "absurdist" Pinter), but instead explores the vicissitudes of living within ideological, discursive, and social structures that always exceed the subject.

Gender and Power in the Plays of Harold Pinter

Gender and Power in the Plays of Harold Pinter
Author: Victor L. Cahn
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2011-12-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1725230518

During the past century, artists have been preoccupied with the search for meaning in a fragmented world. In this book Victor L. Cahn suggests that the plays of Harold Pinter dramatize how such a search leads characters to try to establish security through control of territory and people. The resulting conflict often manifests itself in a gender battle, in which men dominate the physical arena and women the emotional. The innate tension between the sexes is both comic and unnerving, but also reflects humanity's eternal quest for meaning and identity.

Buzz Buzz! Playwrights, Actors and Directors at the National Theatre

Buzz Buzz! Playwrights, Actors and Directors at the National Theatre
Author: Jonathan Croall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2015-01-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1408149427

Containing over a hundred interviews conducted over the last fifteen years with leading directors, actors and writers at the National Theatre, Buzz Buzz! is a fantastic compendium that offers unrivalled insight into the work and practice of the best theatre talent. In these illuminating interviews playwrights such as Michael Frayn, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, David Hare, Pam Gems and Tony Kushner and many others talk about the roots of their work, their methods of research, and how they collaborate with their directors, while actors from Fiona Shaw to Kenneth Branagh, and directors from Peter Hall to Marianne Elliott, contribute fascinating insights into their ideas and ways of working. The book covers plays by the Greeks and Shakespeare, English and European classics, and the best of modern English, Irish and American drama. Theatre writer and commentator Jonathan Croall draws on the vast wealth of interviews he's conducted at the National Theatre in this fascinating and wide-ranging book.