The Late Harold Pinter

The Late Harold Pinter
Author: Basil Chiasson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2017-08-09
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137508167

This volume is the first to provide a book-length study of Pinter’s overtly political activity. With chapters on political drama, poetry, and speeches, it charts a consistent tension between aesthetics and politics through Pinter’s later career and defines the politics of the work in terms of a pronounced sensory dimension and capacity to affect audiences. The book brings to light unpublished letters and drafts from the Pinter Archive in the British Library and draws his political poems and speeches, which have previously been overshadowed by his plays, into the foreground. Intended for students, instructors, and researchers in drama and theatre, performance studies, literature, and media studies, this book celebrates Pinter’s later life and work by discerning a coherent political voice and project and by registering the complex ways that project troubles the divide between aesthetics and politics.

Must You Go?

Must You Go?
Author: Antonia Fraser
Publisher: Bond Street Books
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2010-11-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0385669100

A moving testament to modern literature's most celebrated marriage: that of the greatest playwright of our age, Harold Pinter, and the beautiful and famous prize-winning biographer, Antonia Fraser. In this exquisite memoir, Antonia Fraser recounts the life she shared with the internationally renowned dramatist. In essence, it is a love story and a marvelously insightful account of their years together. Must You Go? is based on Fraser's recollections and on the diaries she has kept since October 1968. She shares Pinter's own revelations about his past, as well as observations by his friends.

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter
Author: Basil Chiasson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2021-01-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350133647

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.

The Essential Pinter

The Essential Pinter
Author: Harold Pinter
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2006
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780802142696

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

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter
Author: Graham Saunders
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2023-06-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000890945

Harold Pinter provides an up-to-date analysis and reappraisal concerning the work of one of the most studied and performed dramatists in the world. Drawing extensively from The Harold Pinter Archive at the British Library as well as reviews and other critical materials, this book offers new insights into previously established views about his work. The book also analyses and reappraises specific key historical and contemporary productions, including a selection of Pinter’s most significant screenplays. In particular, this volume seeks to assess Pinter’s critical reputation and legacy since his death in 2008. These include his position as a political writer and political activist – from disassociation and neutrality on the subject until relatively late in his career when his drama sought to explicitly address questions of political dissent and torture by totalitarian regimes. The book revisits some familiar territories such as Pinter’s place as a British absurdist and the role memory plays in his work, but it also sets out to explore new territories such as Pinter’s changing attitudes towards gender in the light of #MeToo and queer politics and how in particular a play such as The Caretaker (1960) through several key productions has brought the issues of race into sharper focus. Part of the Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatist series, Harold Pinter provides an essential and accessible guide to the dramatists’ work.

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.

The Theatre of Harold Pinter

The Theatre of Harold Pinter
Author: Mark Taylor-Batty
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2014-03-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1408175320

The plays of the late Nobel laureate Harold Pinter have formed part of the canon of world theatre since the 1960s. Frequently revived on the professional stage, and studied on almost every Theatre Studies course, his importance and influence is hard to overestimate. This Critical Companion offers an assessment of Pinter's entire body of work for the stage, appraising his skill as a dramatist and considering his impact and legacy. Through a clear focus on issues of theatricality and the effect of the plays in performance The Theatre of Harold Pinter considers Pinter's chief narrative concerns and offers a unifying theme through which over four decades of work may be understood. Plays are considered in themed chapters that follow the chronological sequence of work, illuminating the development of his aesthetic and concerns. The volume features too a series of essays from other leading scholars presenting different critical perspectives on the work, including Harry Burton on Pinter's early drama; Ann Hall on Revisiting Pinter's Women; Chris Megson on Pinter's Memory Plays of the 1970s, and Basil Chiasson on Neoliberalism and Democracy.

The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter

The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter
Author: Peter Raby
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2001-09-20
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780521658423

The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter provides an introduction to one of the world's leading and most controversial writers, whose output in many genres and roles continued to grow until the author's death in 2008. Harold Pinter, winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, produced work for the theatre, radio, television and screen, in addition to being a highly successful director and actor. This volume examines the wide range of Pinter's work (including his recent play Celebration). The first section of essays places his writing within the critical and theatrical context of his time, and its reception worldwide. The Companion moves on to explore issues of performance, with essays by practitioners and writers. The third section addresses wider themes, including Pinter as celebrity, the playwright and his critics, and the political dimensions of his work. The volume offers photographs from key productions, a chronology, checklist of works and bibliography.

Collected Poems and Prose

Collected Poems and Prose
Author: Harold Pinter
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 148
Release: 1996
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780802134349

An essential collection for any admirer of Harold Pinter, this brand-new, updated edition of his own selection of his poems and prose includes three never-before-published pieces, the most recent of which he wrote in January 1995. Included are love poems, political diatribes, short stories, character portraits. Some are intimately connected with plays; others are intriguingly allusive, and all of them share Pinter's lean, taut, and sometimes jarringly original use of language. Katherine Burkman has said that "like Shakespeare, Pinter is a poet," and in this single volume we see that Harold Pinter is not only, as Irving Wardle has written in the London Times, "our best living playwright" but one of the most accomplished writers in the English language today.