Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11524.33 | Fiction literature | 19 August 2012
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The Birthday Party
The Birthday Party (1958) is the first full-length play by Harold Pinter and one of Pinter's best-known and most-frequently performed plays. After its hostile London reception almost ended Pinter's playwriting career, it went on to be considered "a classic".
The Art of Crime: The Plays and Films of Harold Pinter and David Mamet is the first collection of essays dedicated to a critical assessment of the centrality and pervasiveness of crime, crime stories, and criminalityin the work of Harold Pinter and David Mamet, writers whose work is typically linked by their facility with language, theatricality, and distinctive idiom.
Fraser is a highly regarded British biographer, and the late Harold Pinter, her husband, was a Nobel-winning British playwright. So, the circle they generally traveled in was made up of not only fellow writers but also, because of their individual and combined celebrity, fellow celebrities. Fraser’s latest book is both joyous and sad. The former because she shares diary entries concerning her relationship with Pinter (they lived together from August 1975 until Christmas 2008), and it was obviously a stimulating love-match. And sad because the book ends when it does because of Pinter’s death from cancer; his struggle with the disease had been years-long.
"Retired naval officer Charles Evans writes interestingly on Pinter in Russia. John Fowles provides the superb, three-paragraph "Afterword: Harold Pinter and Cricket." Including ten black-and-white illustrations and set in a clear typeface with sensible margins, this is a well-produced book."
The drama of Harold Pinter evolves in an atmosphere of mystery. While the surfaces of life are realistically detailed, the patterns below the surface are as obscure as the motives of the characters, the pause as prominent and suggestive as the dialogue. Despite the vivid naturalism of his characters' conversations, they behave very often more like figures in a dream than people with whom one can easily identify, at least on superficial levels.
