Harold Pinter

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.

'A dark, elegiac play, studded with brutally and swaggeringly funny jokes.' Sunday Times 'A deeply poignant, raffishly comic, emotion-charged study of the gulf between parents and children and the anguish of approaching death... Beckett, the poet of terminal stages, inevitably comes to mind. What instantly moves one is Pinter's image of a man confronting death in a spirit of rage, fear and uncertainty... The piss-taking Pinter humour and the undercutting of verbal pretence are all there. But what makes this an extraordinary play is that Pinter both corrals his familiar themes - the subjectiveness of memory, the unknowability of one's lifelong partner, the gap between the certain present and the uncertain past - and extends his territory. He shows, with unflinching candour, that in an age shorn of systems and beliefs we face "death's dateless date" in a state of mortal terror.' Guardian 'Pinter has written few more fascinating plays.' Times First staged at the Almeida Theatre, London, in September 1993, Moonlight was revived at the Donmar, London, in April 2011. 'The foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century.' Swedish Academy citation on awarding Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2005

First published in 1983, Harold Pinter is an original study into the work of one of Britain’s foremost dramatists. The book celebrates Pinter’s elusiveness as a writer. It considers his position as a specifically contemporary writer of the post-modernist tradition, and explores his use of language as a sophisticated means of non-communication, acting as a smokescreen behind which his characters lie. The book presents the language games used by Pinter according to their strategic importance, beginning with his earlier works and suggesting a chronological progression. It also discusses Pinter’s later developments, such as the screenplay for The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Harold Pinter is ideal for anyone with an interest in the work and literary techniques of contemporary writers and dramatists.

'The work of our best living playwright in its command of the language and its power to erect a coherent structure in a twilight zone of confusion and dismay.' The TimesDo Hirst and Spooner really know each other, or are they performing an elaborate charade? The ambiguity - and the comedy - intensify with the arrival of Briggs and Foster. All four inhabit a no-man's-land between time present and a time remembered, between reality and imagination.No Man's Land was first presented at the National Theatre at the Old Vic, London, in 1975, revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, with Harold Pinter as Hirst and revived by the National Theatre, directed by Harold Pinter, in 2001.

This first full-length book on Pinter goes beyond an introductory study to an examination of the isolation characters in his plays endure and the lack of communication they bear. Dealing with Pinter's principal works, from his first play, The Room (1957), through his most recent, Silence (1969), Hollis shows that Pinter has created a new poetic, in which the real presence, silence, communicates--reflecting fears of real people searching for basic human needs.

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.