Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

American playwrights have a tendency to fizzle out. Miller, Albee, Williams fit the bill. Their best work came early on, and they spent the rest of their lives trying to earn enough to maintain the lifestyle. Pinter looked ready to join the ranks of the has-beens. After a dazzling start, his work began to grow more obscure, perhaps more precious. Pinter's claim to fame, after all, came with his ability to capture the stark brutality of the English working class; his ear for the obscene banter of everyday life made him a stand out in the era of kitchen sink drama. Then came years of elite living and an increasingly T.S. Eliot-like metaphysical tone. "Celebration" takes one back to the old Pinter. It is quite simply the most beautifully wrought piece of satire to appear since Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest." It is, as they say, wickedly funny. It is published here for sentiment, one supposes, along with an early piece, where one gets the old Pinter: kitchen sink all right, but lots of menace and mystery. It's a nice juxtaposition and a fine intro to Pinter''s world, old and new.