Customer Reviews

Complete Works, Vol. 1

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

If you must have Pinter and are short of cash, this volume is THE must have(although I'd recommend all four volumes). Three classic Pinter plays are included in this volume: The Birthday Party, The Room, and The Dumb Waiter. For those of you new to Pinter, more than likely it was one of these plays that turned you on to him. However, the selling point of this volume is not actually the plays, but the outstanding introduction entitled "Writing for the Theatre" which is a 1962 speech made by Pinter himself. Any aspiring playwright as well as those immersed in all that is Pinteresque will find this introduction both profound and useful. On another note, for Pinter completists, be advised that The Birthday Party, The Room, and The Dumb Waiter are on VHS. The Dumb Waiter and The Room are difficult to find, but rest assured they're out there. In short, if you must have Pinter, this is the volume to get.

Harold Pinter, what more can be said than that he is one of the most important playwrights to come out of England in the past 100+ years.

"The Dumb Waiter," shows Pinter's dark indoor confussion at its best. "The Birthday Party," is twisted and fully capable of playing tricks with a reader's mind.

Anyone who enjoys Pinter, Samual Beckett (Pinter's mentor & author of "Waiting for Godot," as well as countless other pieces), or good absurd theater would be well advised to purchase this set of plays, short stories etc.

Early works of Pinter, show him at his best as a writer and this edition gives a great value. There are a lot of plays, an essay, and a couple of short stories, all in a book that does not cost too much more than an average "Grove Press," single play.

"Complete Works 1," will take you to some fascinating but dark places, and at the end you will be ready and excited to buy the second (then third, then fourth) edition(s) of Pinter's "Complete Works."

And Pinter says it brilliantly by having his characters communicate so little. These are truly menacing portraits of ordinary people in ordinary situations. I felt very uneasy reading these plays, as if language in Pinter's world is steadily losing its ability to signify. I imagine acting in a Pinter play must be incredibly difficult. "THE BIRTHDAY PARTY" was fantastic. What exactly is a Pinter play? I wish I could say, definitively, but I'm at a loss. Mostly these people are terrified by people on the fringes of their lives(outside their windows, in the basement of an apartment, in the same inn) who don't reveal their intentions but seem to want to do harm to the main characters. Sometimes, I think that Pinter's characters recognize the menace within themselves and project it onto other people. Part of the greatness of Pinter's work is that I'm at a loss to explain it.

Harold Pinter is arguably one of the most important playwrights to come out of England in the past 100 years. His plays resonate in the minds of his audience, not for what is said, but for what is left unspoken. The plays in this edition show Pinter at his best as a writer and are valuable to the reader.

Also recommended: REDEFINING THE 'SELF': SELECTED ESSAYS ON SWIFT, POE, PINTER, AND JOYCE by John Condon Murray

HAROLD Pinter's career as a playwright is highly distinguished by anyone's reckoning. Many critics have no reservations in calling him 'our greatest living playwright'. But few would argue that it is on a handful of stage plays, from The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, and The Homecoming in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to Old Times, No Man's Land, and Betrayal in the 1970s, that his reputation rests.

In recent times, Pinter's celebrity has depended more on his politics than on his plays. The master of the dramatic pause now seems more of a rebel without a pause, taking almost every opportunity to make moral pronouncements on current affairs. A scathing critic of US foreign policy and British Government support for it, he was prominent in the popular campaign against the recent Iraq war, even penning a poem in the lead-up to the conflict: 'Here they go again/The Yanks in their armoured parade/Chanting their ballads of joy/As they gallop across the big world/Praising America's God...'

In an earlier letter to the New York Review of Books in 1994, Pinter differentiated US foreign policy from the mass murder inspired by Hitler, Stalin and Mao only on the grounds of its moral hypocrisy: 'The great difference between the ruthless foreign policy of the US and other equally ruthless policies is that US propaganda is infinitely cleverer and the Western media wonderfully compliant'.

Book arrived in terrible condition. Was supposed to be Like New. Spine was broken and book was warped. Never received a book in such bad condition. Have to reorder to get a readable copy.

The Birthday Party is an unparalleled classic, and is nothing like anything that Ionesco has ever written. This book is worth buying just for that.

Alas this isn't the best of his works - Death etc. was most impressive. But The Room and The Black and White make for fascinating reads, and should be even more exciting when staged. This should come before Beckett in anyone's reading.

One review of Pinter's plays says that "part of the greatness of Pinter's work is that I'm at a loss to explain it." What complete and utter rubbish! Basically that means that either Pinter is great because I'm too dumb to understand him, or Pinter is great because he makes no sense, so obviously he is really deep and profound. Well here's my take: I'm comfortably on the upper half of the food chain when it comes to intelligence, and when I'm at a loss to explain why an author's work is great, it's because his work, in fact, is not great. I wouldn't say the same thing about nuclear physics or brain surgery - when somebody does great work in those fields and I don't understand it, I'll chalk it up to "this guy might be really smart and I just don't know what he's talking about." But literature? Come on... the whole point of literature is that it is supposed to connect with the reader, not bewilder him. It's supposed to reveal meaningful truths about humanity, not leave us feeling dazed and confused. It's supposed to create a bond between writer and reader, not create a vast intellectual divide.

So back to Mr. Pinter... He's just not all that good. I will say a few nice things about him. The plays aren't boring, as some people have suggested. Seriously, how can you get bored reading a play that's only 30 pages long? The cadence of the dialog is catchy, and the plays have a certain rhythm to them that you can tap your foot to. And Pinter is very good at creating a sense of anxiety within his characters. Since there isn't much going on in these plays in terms of action, and since the stage is sparsely decorated, and the dialog is often terse and stunted, the reader ends up focusing more on what is not there, and what is not happening, and what is not being said, rather than what is. So you constantly ask yourself, Who are those people in the basement that we know nothing about and who we are never going to meet? What is this job that is going to be done, but never gets described in any kind of detail? By building his plays around characters who never appear and events that never occur, Pinter forces us to wonder anxiously about the unknown. He creates this eerie sense of mystery, this feeling that we are all alone in a world that we know very little about.

But here's the key question: So what? Sure, he's good at making us feel uncomfortable, but he doesn't take it any farther than that. You would think that to win the Nobel Prize, your readers would at least have to understand why you want them to feel uncomfortable. What is your message? What are you saying about our world and the human experience? It's simply not enough to create a mood. There has to be a point to it, and it's just not clear what the point is to these plays.

First, the reason for one star is a reminder to leave Pinter's plays to others.

I read the "The Birthday Party," and, "The Room," and may or may not read the rest of the plays.

Informatively I am an avid reader with a vast collection.

The Birthday Party and The Room did not have one redeeming feature. I could not believe that anything written could be so bad.

In my opinion both were absolute garbage and I wonder how and why in the first place it was every published. When I finished reading this nonsense a thought came to mind as follows:
If a monkey was placed by a computer keyboard and was allowed to
go crazy hitting the keys, the result would probably be, "The Birthday Party and The Room.

Since I was punished enough reading the above, reading the rest of the plays would only compound my bewilderment and disappointment in choosing this book.

If this book was offered to a publisher by a writer other than Harold Pinter and the editor read the first two plays, if he read that far, which I doubt, he would have thrown the book in his waste basket followed by an oath.

Unfortunately, I purchased a couple of the Pinter Books from Amazon.com and will check them out only because I purchased them
and am curious to learn if they are as bad a read as the one I reviewed.

Robert Lyons
Reno, Nevada