Harold Pinter

http://www.haroldpinter.org/ "The Official Harold Pinter Website"

Harold Pinter is a playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor, director author, and political activist, best known for his plays "The Birthday Party", "The Caretaker", "The Homecoming", "Betrayal", and for his screenplay adaptations of novels by others, such as "The Servant" and "The French Lieutenant's Woman". The recipient of scores of awards and honorary degrees, Pinter received the Nobel Prize in Literature in December 2005. In its citation, the Academy states that "Harold Pinter is generally regarded as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century".

The Dumb Waiter

Pinter's work is heavily influenced by Samuel Beckett, who used silence-filled pauses for a revolutionary theatrical effect. Pinter has spoken of speech as a stratagem designed to cover the nakedness of silence, and these aims are often evident in the dialogue of Gus and Ben. Ben's most prominent response to Gus's constant questions about the nature of their jobs is silence. Lurking underneath this silence is always the threat of violence, the anticipation of something deathly—the play ends as Ben trains his gun on Gus in silence.

Two assassins, Ben and Gus are waiting in a basement hotel room for their assignment. Ben, the senior member of the duo, calmly reads the newspaper articles and recites them out loud when he finds them interesting. Gus, on the other hand, is pacing around the room nervously. He complains constantly, including that he is haunted by the memory of their last victim, a girl. Gus regrets his choice of profession.
In the back of the room is a dumbwaiter, which delivers occasional food orders. As these orders come in, the tension builds. Gus keeps asking Ben questions, and Ben refuses to answer (or even listen to) him. Tension builds to the point where they even come to blows.
Gus leaves the room to get a drink of water, and the dumbwaiter intercom comes on. Ben listens carefully -- we gather from his replies that their victim has arrived and is on his way to the room. Ben shouts for Gus, who is still out of the room. The door opens, Ben rounds on it with his gun, and Gus enters, stripped of his jacket, waistcoat, tie and gun. There is a long silence as the two stare at each other before the curtain comes down (the implication is that Gus is the person that Ben has been employed to kill).

It was first produced at the Hampstead Theatre Club on January 21, 1960. On July 23, 1985, a version for television was broadcast by the BBC.

The Birthday Party

Taken at face value, the play concerns Stanley, a failed piano player, who lives in a boarding house (run by Meg and Petey), in a British seaside town. (All the place names suggest that the house is in a seaside town on the south coast of England.¹) On his birthday, Stanley is visited by two men, Goldberg and McCann. A supposedly innocent birthday party quickly becomes a nightmare as Stanley is psychologically tortured, Meg is strangled, and Lulu is sexually assaulted.
It is quickly learned that very little of the expository information can be taken at face value. In Act I, Stanley describes his career saying "I've played the piano all over the world. All over the country" and then after a pause simply "I once gave a concert." Although Meg claims that her house is a "boarding house", her husband seems surprised that she is able to take in borders and later Stanley (being the supposed boarder) flat out denies the fact. Much of the plot revolves around the fact that Meg is planning to celebrate Stanley's birthday; a fact that he denies several times throughout the play. (Meg claims he doesn't know that it's his birthday because she's keeping it a secret.) McCann claims to have no knowledge of Stanley or Maidenhead (Stanley's hometown), but his partner later names two businesses that Stanley used to frequent connecting them clearly to Maidenhead. The past is made more confusing by the question of identity: Goldberg is called "Nat," but in his stories of the past he was called "Simey" and also "Benny"; McCann is also referred to as both "Seamus" and "Dermot". Although Stanley at one point of the birthday party begins to strangle Meg, she has no memory of it the next morning.

The Caretaker

The story involves two brothers, Aston and Mick, who share a small flat together in London and let an old man, Davies, come to live with them for a few weeks. As the action unfolds, it becomes clear that all the characters have dreams which they seem unlikely ever to fulfill, and the tension created among them is great at times.

The room

The Room has strong ties to The Birthday Party, also by Harold Pinter. Both plays take place in a derelict boarding house which becomes the scene of a visitation. In The Room, a blind black man suddenly arrives to deliver a mysterious message.
The Room is invested with the elements that make Pinter's work unique: the disturbing familiarity of the dialogue, the subtle characterization, the compulsive power that can be by turns funny, moving, and wildly funny.

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