Jack Kroll in Newsweek has called Harold Pinter "the most fascinating, enigmatic and accomplished dramatist in the English language." Since his first full-length play, The Birthday Party (1958), and continuing with The Homecoming (1965), Pinter has trained a sharp eye on the strange dynamics of modern family life. In his newest play, Celebration, he continues to examine the darker places of relationships. Celebration is an acerbic portrait of a sated culture choking on its own material success. Startling, full of black humor and wicked satire, Celebration displays a vivid zest for life. Also included in this volume is Pinter's classic play The Room. Both plays are invested with the elements that make Pinter's work unique: the disturbingly familiar dialogue, subtle characterization, and abrupt mood and power shifts among characters, which can be by turns terrifying, moving, and wildly funny.
Collected here in one volume are two hallmark plays by Harold Pinter, Celebration, first performed in 2000, and his first play, The Room, first performed in 1957. Both plays are invested with the element that make Pinter's work unique: the disturbingly familiar dialogue, subtle characterization, and abrupt mood and power shifts among characters, which can be by turns terrifying, moving, and wildly funny.
"In Pinter's plays, words are probes launched into the world, variously, to mask, to mystify, to mock, or to murder. He sets out his entire smorgasbord of gorgeous verbal moves in Celebration, which, like all good festive occasions, he keeps light and lively."--John Lahr, The New Yorker
"Celebration [is] hugely entertaining. The riotous one-liners fall far faster and funnier than ever.... Pinter captures the vacuous idiocies of everyday dialogue with dazzling skill."--Georgina Brown, The Mail on Sunday
"One of the finest comic writers in the language...[Celebration's] dialogue has a sense of ebb and flow, of bursting out and retreating in defeat, of self-abasement and evasion, of attack and tactical withdrawal. The result is that the most prosaic passages can have a musical quality; harsh minor keys, perversely accurate rhythms, heady crescendos that take you headlong into pauses pregnant with knowledge."--John Peters, The Sunday Times (London)
Harold Pinter is the author of such modern classics for the stage as The Homecoming and The Birthday Party. He lives in London and is married to Antonia Fraser.
