Harold Pinter

This volume contains Harold Pinter's first six plays, including The Birthday Party. The Birthday Party Stanley Webber is visited in his boarding house by two strangers, Goldberg and McCann. An innocent-seeming birthday party for Stanley turns into a nightmare. The Room and The Dumb Waiter In these two early one-act plays, Harold Pinter reveals himself as already in full control...

'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 When Teddy, a professor in an American university, brings his wife Ruth to visit his old home in London, he finds his family still living in the house. In the conflict...

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...

The Caretaker is splendidly funny. The dialogue here is full of life and humour, meticulously and often hilariously pinning down the way people actually talk—the hesitancies, the evasions, the obsessive tricks of speech. He creates such rich demotic poetry out of improbable subjects. You don't want his characters to stop talking. Daily Telegraph 'One of the greatest of post-war British...

A great, disturbing play. Guardian Mr Pinter's terrifying blend of pathos and hatred fuses unforgettably into the stuff of art. Sunday Times The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter centres on Stanley Webber, who is visited in his boarding house by two strangers, Goldberg and McCann. An innocent-seeming birthday party for Stanley turns into a nightmare.

Includes: 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, Celebration The book commemorates the tenth anniversary of the...