Celebration and The Room: Two Plays (Pinter, Harold) [Paperback]

Harold Pinter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 12, 2000 | Series: Pinter, Harold

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (June 12, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802137083
• ISBN-13: 978-0802137081
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #656,289 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A 2000 play mixed with his first play from 1957, October 12, 2005

By 

Christopher Culver - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Celebration and The Room: Two Plays (Pinter, Harold) (Paperback)

This book, published in 2001 around the time of the playwright's 70th birthday and a bit of a retrospective, contains two plays by Harold Pinter. The first is "Celebration", first presented in 2000, and the second is Pinter's first play "The Room", dating from 1957.

The comedy "Celebration" comes as a bit of a change of pace after the very intense "political" plays Pinter wrote from 1985 to the turn of the millennium. Riotously funny, it is set in "the best restaurant in Europe" with the stage divided into two tables. At one, Lambert and his brother Matt dined with their wives, Julie and her sister Prue, celebrating the anniversary of Julie and Lambert. At the second table, Suki chats with his wife Russell. As the play progresses, the characters get progressively more drunk, make appalling revelations without realizing it, divulge their infidelities, and yet stay oddly content and glad-hearted. Among the tables roam Richard and Sonia, the owners, and a hilarious intrusive waiter. It has been a long time since I read a Pinter play that made me laugh out loud (unless it was the laugh of shock and outrage at revelations in his political works), and enjoyed "Celebration" immensely.

"The Room" was written when Pinter was still squarely in the genre of theatre of the absurd. Rose, a sixty-something housewife, muses about who's living in the basement flat of her building, talks incessantly to her taciturn husband, and encounters a young couple interested in the room to let. At the end of the play Riley, a "blind negro" enters and brings a surprising message to Rose, resulting in the play's shocking ending. While I found the ending compelling, most of the play is fairly tedious; the very length of the play is a mark of the young writer's immaturity, since mature Pinter is quite compressed. Still, worth checking out as the beginning of a very entertaining career.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Master of Words and Social Comentary, August 7, 2001

By 

Timothy M. McCain (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Celebration and The Room: Two Plays (Pinter, Harold) (Paperback)

Harlod Pinter's Celebration is a work of biting genuis. His darkly comic look on today's society makes the play a standout in a sea of banal work in the theatre world. No American Playwright today comes close to his skill level. If you want to read well crafted theatre, you need to read Celebration and his earlier work The Room.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Instant Classic!, September 1, 2000

By 

Chiang Hai Tat (Jupiter) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Celebration and The Room: Two Plays (Pinter, Harold) (Paperback)

If you are a follower of Pinter, you will love this book because it contains both the first and latest Pinter's plays. Celebration is written this year (2000) while The Room was written way back in 1957. For the new Pinter's fan, this is also an ideal book to be introduced to the great playwright of our time. Like most of his plays, these two plays should be read slowly, paying close attention to their witty dialogues. This is definitely one of the best drama book to come out this year.