Harold Pinter S Politics

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.

Arts, Truth and Politics is Harold Pinter's lecture on receipt of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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 The book brings to light unpublished letters and drafts from the Pinter Archive in the British Library and draws his political poems and speeches, which have previously been overshadowed by his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.

Hailed by The New York Times as "one of the most important playwrights of our day," Harold Pinter is the author of The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, and The Caretaker--just a few of his plays that have become seminal works in our literary canon. In Various Voices, Pinter presents his own selections from over fifty years of prose, poetry, and political writings, offering insight into the man and his oeuvre. Now in paperback, this edition includes recently written new poems and prose. His nonfiction selections span "A Note on Shakespeare" (1950) to "An Interview with Mireia Aragay" (1996); the short stories begin with "Kullus" (1949) and end with "Tess" (2000); and the poetry ranges from "School Life" (1948) to "They All Rang" (1999). The political writings illustrate the lucidity of Pinter's views on human-rights issues.

Stanley Webber is visited in his boarding house by strangers, Goldberg and McCann. An innocent-seeming birthday party for Stanley turns into a nightmare. The Birthday Party was first performed in 1958 and is now a modern classic, produced and studied throughout the world.

‘All you have do is shut up and enjoy the hospitality.’ Terry Harold Pinter’s Party Time (1991) is an extraordinary distillation of the playwright’s key concerns. Pulsing with political anger, it marks a stepping stone on Pinter’s path from iconic dramatist of existential unease to Nobel Prize-winning poet of human rights. G. D. White situates this underrated play within a recognisably ‘Pinteresque’ landscape of ambiguous, brittle social drama while also recognising its particularity: Party Time is haunted by Augusto Pinochet’s right-wing coup against Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government in Chile. This book considers Party Time and its confederate plays in the dual context of Pinter’s literary career and burgeoning international concern with human rights and freedom of expression, contrasting his uneasy relationship with the UK’s powerful elite with the worldwide acclaim for his dramatic eviscerations of power.

This is a chilling study of power and powerlessness. Set in an unnamed totalitarian state, this play presents a violent, disturbing portrait of political horror in which an interrogator torments a tortured prisoner and his imprisoned wife and child.

THE STORY: Furthering the theme of political consciousness expressed so forcefully and eloquently in his earlier play One for the Road, the author's present play takes place in an anonymous country where individual liberties have been forfeited to the state. Set in a prison where the inmates are forbidden to speak their own language, the play is comprised of four terse, arresting scenes which make masterful use of nuance and subtle understatement (with sudden bursts of violence) to create an overwhelming sense of terror and shocking futility. In one scene uniformed officers taunt and belittle the women who have come to visit their men, who are political prisoners; in another a mother and son are allowed to speak only in the language of the capital, which they do not know; in the third scene a young woman accidentally sees a guard holding a limp, tortured man whom she knows to be her husband; and, in the final scene the old woman reunited with her bloody, trembling son and, though told she may now speak, she has been silenced so long that she cannot, or will not, do so. Quintessentially Pinteresque in its skillful use of pregnant pauses, resonant images and nightmarish utterances, the play is both enthralling theatre and a stirring reminder of what can happen when the power of the state becomes all-encompassing and the rights of the individual are forfeited, whether through neglect or weakness of will.