Book jacket/back: When this triptich of new plays by Harold Pinter opened in London in October 1982 it was celebrated by critics and audiences alike as an electrifying theatrical event that confirmed once again the author's undisputed place in the forefront of today's dramatists. "The first two plays in 'Other Places' are strange, comic, and fascinating, but you would know they were Pinter if you met them in yoru dreams. However, the third play, 'A Kind of Alaska,' (which strikes me on instant acquaintance as a masterpiece) moves one in a way no work of his has ever done before...Never before have I Known a Pinter play to leave one so emotionally wrung through." Michael Billington, The Guardian. "Harold Pinter is writing at the top of his powers...It has taken some of us time to learn Pinter's language. He was never less obscure than here, or more profoundly eloquent about the fragile joy of being alive." —John Barber, The Daily Telegraph In "A Kind of Alaska," a middle-aged woman wakes up after nearly thirty years passed in a coma induced by sleeping sickness. "Victoria Station" is a hilarious nocturnal dialogue on a car radio between a lost taxi driver and his controller; "Family Voices," originally broadcast as a radio play and subsequently presented in a "platform performance," is a set of parallel monologues in the form of letters which a mother, son and father may have written to each other but never exchanged.
Author
Plays, including The Birthday Party (1958) and The Dumb Waiter (1960), of British playwright, screenwriter, and director Harold Pinter create an atmosphere of menace; people awarded him the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005. This English actor, political activist, and poet ranks of the most influential of modern times. After publishing poetry and acting in school plays as a teenager in London, Pinter, touring throughout Ireland, began his professional theatrical career in 1951. From 1952, he acted in repertory companies throughout England for a dozen years; he used the stage name David Baron in the late 1950s. Beginning with The Room (1957), first play, of Pinter, his writing career spanned over a half-century and produced 29 original stage plays, 27 screenplays, many dramatic sketches, radio plays, television plays, poetry, one novel, short fiction, essays, speeches, and letters. His best-known plays include The Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted to film. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He directed almost 50 stage, television, and film productions and acted extensively in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works. Despite frail health after being diagnosed with esophageal cancer in December 2001, Pinter continued to act on stage and screen, last performing the title role in a critically-acclaimed stage production of Samuel Beckett's one-act monologue Krapp's Last Tape, for the 50th anniversary season of the Royal Court Theatre, in October 2006. Pinter's dramas often involve strong conflicts among ambivalent characters who struggle for verbal and territorial dominance and for their own versions of the past. Stylistically, these works are marked by theatrical pauses and silences, comedic timing, irony and menace. Thematically ambiguous, they raise complex issues of individual identity oppressed by social forces, language, and vicissitudes of memory. In 1981, Pinter stated that he was not inclined to write plays explicitly about political subjects; yet in the mid-1980s he began writing overtly political plays, reflecting his own heightening political interests and changes in his personal life. This "new direction" in his work and his left-wing political activism stimulated additional critical debate about Pinter's politics. Pinter, his work, and his politics have been the subject of voluminous critical commentary. Pinter received numerous awards. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he received the Tony Award for Best Play in 1967 for The Homecoming. He was given BAFTA awards, the French Légion d'honneur and 20 honorary degrees. Festivals and symposia have been devoted to him and his work. In awarding the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy noted, "That he occupies a position as a modern classic is illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama: 'Pinteresque'". He died from liver cancer on 24 December 2008. He was buried the following week at Kensal Green Cemetery in North West London.
