Party Time and The New World Order: Two Plays

Two plays from the Nobel Prize winner that holds an undisputed place in the front ranks of contemporary playwrights.

These two plays, Party Time and The New World Order, work in chilling tandem, each demonstrating the inevitable brutality that comes with a total conviction of right.

Party Time is a terrifying portrait of the culpable indifference of a privileged class, of the cruelty engendered in its members by political disruption, and of their merciless extinction of dissent. At an elegant cocktail party, a stylish bourgeoisie discusses country clubs and summer homes, while below in the streets a sinister military presence protects them from the unmentionable horrors of poverty, vulgarity, squalor.

In The New World Order, two interrogators harass a man whom they condemn for his questioning of received ideas, and whom we know only as threat to their closed vision of democracy.

Harold Pinter was born in the London borough of Hackney in 1930. During World War II, Pinter and his family escaped the Blitzkrieg by moving to Cornwall and Reading, which had a profound impact on him. In 1948 Pinter entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but after two years he dropped out.

The Room, Pinter’s first play, was written in 1957 and was performed as a student production and the University of Bristol. Pinter’s second play, and one of his best known, The Birthday Party (1957), was initially ill-received by the critics, but with The Caretaker (1960) Pinter secured his theatrical status.

Some of Pinter’s most celebrated theatrical works include Landscape (1968), The Homecoming (1964), Betrayal (1978), and The Go-Between (1980). In 2005, the Swedish Academy awarded Pinter the Nobel Prize in Literature stating that “in his plays [he] uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.”