Reviews for The Essential Pinter: Selections from the Work of Harold Pinter

The average rating for The Essential Pinter: Selections from the Work of Harold Pinter based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-11-28 00:00:00 Danny Yang A masterful collection of one of the most distinct playwrights who ever lived. High praise, granted, and yes I'm woefully under-read in my theater and haven't seen as much as I should have. But this is something I hope to rectify as soon as time and sanity allow (living that grad student life). Some specifics, Pinter's writing is brilliantly precise in delineating what's implied and what's left out completely. A true master of ratcheting up dread and tension, Pinter gives his readers (and audiences) just enough to apprehend the ripples of something bigger and (usually) more horrible rumbling just beneath the surface of the dialogue and setting. Coming as I do from a mostly prose background reading this collection was a crash course in mood and ambiance, in showing such restraint that you become a master of manipulating your audience's sense of frustration, anxiety, and, yes, even comedy too. Black Comedy, Kafkaesque definitely, but akin to the spirit of the rest of his abilities as a writer, Pinter's humorous asides are as well calculated as a finely tuned watch. Though maybe not as hammer to your face effective as his predecessor and friend Samuel Beckett, Pinter trumps his friend in subtly with taut prose that talks around a story, a point, a philosophy and even an ideology in a way that would make Ernest Hemingway jealous. In summation, this is an incredible collection and one that I'm already sorry to see go (it was a rental) but I will not soon forget the effect Pinter evoked with his words, his nuances, his infamous pauses, and most memorably, his absences on me. In what was left out and left behind for the sake of what was to be implied and hinted at, whispered towards, Pinter truly has no equal.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-10-10 00:00:00 John Brody Harold Pinter, on his birthday October 10 Comedies of dehumanization and existential dread, satires of power relations and the Sadeian-Freudian dynamics of sex and gender, a Nabokovian obsession with the illusions of self and memory, the tyranny of history and other people, a Sartrean defiance and revolt against authority and the tilting at windmills; Harold Pinter's Absurdism comes direct from the protege and collaborator of Samuel Beckett, but does not end there. His is a broad and deep vision, his plays acts of transformation characterized by Rashomon-like multiplicities of meaning, prophecies, and a ferocious engagement with the forces of repression. The Birthday Party, a Kafka-esque set of puzzles and Socratic questions which interrogate truth and lies, illusion and reality, meaning, being, history, the whole of our human condition from an Existentialist-Absurdist angle of view, must number among the immortal classics of theatre. An excellent introduction to his work, it contains many of his themes and dramatic methods. As the Wikipedia entry has it, "The play has been classified as a comedy of menace, characterized by Pinteresque elements such as ambiguous identity, confusions of time and place, and dark political symbolism." The Homecoming depicts the re-integration of a shattered self as the protagonist Ruth subsumes lost and untethered satellite identities; it is both political satire and a journey to wholeness as therapy. Power asymmetries in relations of all kinds but of gender especially are examined, as well as the moral values underlying family dynamics and social structures. It references and is informed by a close reading of Simone de Beauvoir's Feminist Existentialism. The play seems to have utterly baffled its critics, but to me is a clear and straightforward psychodrama which puts our civilization on the couch to diagnose our modern pathology of disconnectedness and loss of identity as direct effects of the malignity of power. No Man's Land, an example of Harold Pinter's classic theme of a status quo's stasis energized and transformed by an intrusive revolutionary, has a title taken from its final line; "You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent." Eliot's Prufrock is confronted by Nietzsche's Zarathustra, King Lear is redeemed by his Jester, and Leonora Carrington escapes from the madhouse guided by the Hatter and riding Gregor Samsa in his magnificent chthonic form, terrible and beautiful and bearing the icon of St Beatrice of the Absurd. Celebration, his final play, is a brilliant comedy of masks and the struggle for control of identity between self and others, an investigation of memory and history as shaping forces of identity, and of authorized versions of ourselves and the social and political power structures which are their boundaries and limiting factors. As described by the Swedish Academy; "Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles. With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution. Pinter's drama was first perceived as a variation of absurd theatre, but has later more aptly been characterised as 'comedy of menace', a genre where the writer allows us to eavesdrop on the play of domination and submission hidden in the most mundane of conversations. In a typical Pinter play, we meet people defending themselves against intrusion or their own impulses by entrenching themselves in a reduced and controlled existence. Another principal theme is the volatility and elusiveness of the past." One might begin with the excellent Grove Press book The Essential Pinter. Read also the wonderfultribute Harold Pinter: A Celebration by Richard Eyre (Editor).