The only comprehensive guide to the plays of one of the world's greatest yet most puzzling contemporary dramatists, The Pinter Ethic penetrates the mystery of Harold Pinter's work with compelling and authoritative insights that locate and disclose the primal power of his drama in his characters' powerplay for dominance. With remarkable clarity, Penelope Prentice's close reading of Pinter's work untangles the multiple ambiguities, complex conflicts and contradictory actions which continue to baffle, bewilder, and confound critics and audiences. She reveals that Pinter's plays reflect not a vision of postmodern hopelessness in a world threatening to self-destruct, but provoke unguessed choice and action that enlarge the concept of love and link it to justice. Offering a definitive analysis of Pinter's work--from his early poetry, fiction, interviews, essays and novel The Dwarfs to his most recent play Celebration --Prentice demonstrates why Pinter's work can only be communicated through drama where attitude and intention may count for little, but where action is all.

Updated edition of this popular Companion examining the wide range of Pinter's work, and his continuing impact and influence.

While best known as one of the most important playwrights of the twentieth century, Harold Pinter (1930–2008) had an equally successful career writing screenplays. His collaborations with director Joseph Losey garnered great attention and esteem, and two of his screenplays earned Academy Award nominations: The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) and Betrayal (1983). He is also credited for writing an unproduced script to remake Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaptation of Lolita. Much scholarship has been dedicated to the subject of Pinter as playwright, but the rich landscape of his work in film has been left largely undisturbed. In Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter's Screenplays and the Artistic Process, Steven H. Gale, the world's foremost Pinter scholar, analyzes Pinter's creative process from initial conception to finished film. Gale makes careful, point-by-point comparisons of each stage in the screenplay's creation—the source material, the adaptations themselves, and the films made from the scripts—in order to reveal the meaning behind each film script and to explain the cinematic techniques used to express that meaning. Unlike most Pinter scholars, who focus almost solely on the written word, Gale devotes discussion to the cinematic interpretation of the scripts through camera angles and movement, cutting, and other techniques. Pinter does not merely convert his stage scripts to screenplays; he adapts the works to succeed in the other medium, avoiding elements of the live play that do not work onscreen and using the camera's focusing operations in ways that are not possible on the stage. As Pinter's career progressed and his writing evolved, screenplays became for him an increasingly vital means of creative expression. Sharp Cut is the first study to fully explore this important component of the Pinter canon.

Nicholas Grene explores the subject of domestic spaces in modern drama through close readings of nine major plays.

Pinter’s World: Pinter and Company is not a full-scale biography but a series of illuminating chapters about Pinter’s life, character, and thought, employing new information found in his “Appointment Diaries,” recent biographical sources such as Simon Gray’s memoirs, and Henry Woolf’s reminiscences in addition to personal discussions with several in Pinter’s world. This book provides a fresh illumination of Pinter’s life and art, his friendships, obsessions, and concerns.Material is arranged around themes, key concerns, Pinter’s activities. Pinter’s meetings and endeavors, for instance, with whom he met and when, when he wrote what and when, and his perspective at the time are documented. This work explores Pinter’s writing: drama, poetry, prose, journalism, and letters, which are here regarded as part of his aesthetic achievement. Pinter’s World: Pinter and Company presents a pointillist portrait of him through examining central concerns in his life. These encompass an obsession with the theater and games; delight in restaurants, demonstrating that Pinter is far removed from the socially awkward isolated figures populating his early work; and the women in Pinter’s world. Other areas examined include Pinter’s political engagement, from his adolescence to his last years, and the literary and other creative influences upon him. This work draws upon consultation of his papers at the British Library, including letters to others, especially close friends with whom he kept close contact for over half a century. These letters should be regarded on par with his other creative accomplishments. Pinter was a fascinating letter writer, whose letters reveal thoughts at the time of writing often in abrupt most colorful idiomatic language. His “Appointment Diaries” cannot reveal what actually occurred during his meetings, but they do provide a guide to what he did on a daily basis and whom he met. Memories from his friends, his professional colleagues, cricket players, and his second wife, Antonia Fraser, illuminate Pinter’s personality and actions. Pinter’s first literary love was poetry and, unlike most other Pinter studies, this one gives attention to his neglected poetic output that often reveals the real Pinter and the enigma that is at the heart of every great artist.

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.

Shortlisted for the STR Theatre Book Prize 2023 A LA Times best theater book of 2022 Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, by most accounts the leading British playwrights of our time, might seem to come from very different aesthetic, cultural and political worlds. But as Carey Perloff's fascinating new book reveals, the two have much in common. By examining these contemporaries alongside one another and in the context of the rehearsal room, we can glean new insights and connections, including the impact of their Jewish background on their work and their passion for the details of stagecraft. Readers of Pinter and Stoppard: A Director's View will emerge with a set of tools for approaching their work in a performance environment and for unlocking the mysteries of the plays for audiences. Esteemed theatre director Carey Perloff draws upon her first-hand experience of working with both writers, creating case studies of particular plays in production to provide new ways of positioning the work today. 30 years after major criticism on both playwrights first emerged, this is a ripe moment for a fresh examination of the unique contribution of Pinter and Stoppard in the twenty-first century.

This comprehensive and authoritative casebook includes cornerstone essays on Pinter's creative process, his politics, film adaptations, and acting career. It also includes a collection of photos found nowhere else that document Pinter's "golden time"--his early acting days in Ireland--, a substantial introduction, a chronology, and bibliography.

This book provides a holistic approach to Harold Pinter’s plays, from his first play, The Room (1957), to his last play, Celebration (1999). The book is divided into three chapters, organized thematically. The first chapter discusses the early plays—the so-called comedies of menace—concerning the central tropes of secluded settings, intrusion from the outside, and disintegration of the self. The next chapter analyzes Pinter’s memory plays, concentrating on how characters shelter themselves from intrusions through silences and lies. The third chapter examines power games and abuse of power in political plays. The book contributes to the field of Pinter studies by pursuing the thematic, linguistic, and formal elements integral to his aesthetic productions, and delineates the properties that serve as constants in Pinter’s dramatic oeuvre, thus justifying the term Pinteresque: pauses and silences, subtext, anxiety, violence, menace, vulnerability, victimization, intrusion, and power games. The discussions highlight the presence of a solid foundation for his drama—such as his conviction that the past is in the present—and connect all the plays to one another.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.