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"The Caretaker"
"Night School"
"The Dwarfs"
"The Collection"
"The Lover"
"Night School"
"Trouble in the works"
"The black and white request stop."
"The Collection"
"The Lover"
Pinter's plays are not to everyone's taste and really need to be seen, acted well, rather than read, although to study them at leisure, reading is obviously essential and these editions are ideal for that. His plays need to be acted well to make use of the selective pauses, "non sequiturs", over-lapping dialogue and non-verbal language. Fortunately, his plays attract good theatres and "actOrs" able to lift the script from the page.
A mixture of very well-known and not so well-known plays, this edition contains a rich selection of his eerie, threatening, austere, normal, introspective worlds. On one page, forty-six pauses, one of his few directions - [Pause]. His characters always seem "involved", if that is the appropriate word, in a long series of disconnected conversations, lives which tangentially bump into one another, like bumper-cars at the fair - intimate contact but no communication.
In an essay on "The Caretaker", I was once harshly - but rightly - criticised by a professor who recognised in my writing the notion that the characters had continued to live beyond the final curtain. I had taken them home and lived with them for a while before consinging them to the page. This, he informed me, was not the realm of literary criticism, idle speculation on the non-existent. Some of Pinter's characters and settings have that ability to live on, off the stage and page, to haunt, to populate the imagination.
"Mother, mother, I've had the most unpleasant, the most mystifying encounter with the man who calls himself Mr Withers. Will you give me your advice?" "Family Voices", (P 142)
The opening play, "Betrayal," is one of Pinter's most innovative works. Each act of the play takes place chronologically before the previous, resulting in a backward hunt for the source of an adulterous relationship. While ostensibly about adultery, the play really deals with the various kind of betrayal that human beings face: betrayal to friends, betrayal to family, and even betrayal of self. "A Kind of Alaska" is an idiosyncratic play based on Oliver Sacks's novel AWAKENINGS which treats a woman's cure from sleeping sickness. It is one of the most enigmatic of Pinter's plays, and I still do not feel as if I get it.
With "Mountain Language," Pinter created his first overtly political piece. "Mountain Language" is without partisan bias or personal attacks, and doesn't even try to present an opposing voice, it simply introduces a setting of harrowing totalitarianism and allows oppressive rule to prove itself evil. In "The New World Order" and "Party Time," Pinter shows oppression occuring in the democratic first world among the upper-middle class, precisely where one would not expect it, in order to make the spectator or reader think about his nation's contributions to oppression. But Pinter's playwriter remains intensely focused on personal actions; by the volume's final play, "Ashes to Ashes," national policy really isn't really what's being attacked, but it instead forms the mere backdrop for an exploration of individual Man's cruelty to his fellow human being.
If Pinter's politics leave you displeased, this fourth volume of his collected plays is not for you. But for play-lovers who think that with his political engagement Pinter has entered a brilliant second phase of his playwriting life, HAROLD PINTER: PLAYS 4 is a must-have.
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