Harold Pinter
Product details
- ISBN 9781041363774
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 01 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Harold Pinter (1930–2008) was already highly acclaimed in 1988, when this book was originally published, and went on to become one of the most influential modern British dramatists, with a career that spanned over 50 years.
This study reveals Pinter’s dramatic and theatrical stratagems and his place in contemporary drama at the time. Five of its eight chapters are devoted to his plays and their performances. Chapter 1 introduces them through short quotations from his plays, each followed by how they show his methods. A biographical survey is next. Chapter 3, “Menace and the Absurd,” treats his early plays, including The Room and The Birthday Party, as “comedies of menace,” a pun on “comedies of manners,” and as theatre of the absurd. Following this, “Toward Greater Realism” explains common features of such plays as The Caretaker. “Struggles for Power” features The Collection and The Homecoming. In “Memory Plays,” Old Times is prominent. “Recapitulations and Fresh Starts” analyses No Man’s Land, Betrayal, and A Kind of Alaska. Stage productions are a vital part of these discussions of his plays. Finally, “The Place of Pinter” summarizes his oeuvre and his position in English drama.
Bernard F. Dukore is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Theatre Arts and Humanities at Virginia Tech, USA. He has written extensively on Bernard Shaw and other modern dramatists, including Shaw’s fellow-Nobel prizewinner, Harold Pinter. His most recent books on Shaw are Crimes and Punishments and Bernard Shaw (2017), Bernard Shaw and the Censors: Fights and Failures, Stage and Screen (2020), and Unions, Strikes, Shaw: “The Capitalism of the Proletariat” (2022).
