Customer Reviews

Harold Pinter: Plays: 4 (Faber Contemporary Classics)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

HAROLD PINTER: PLAYS 4 includes all of the superb dramatist's plays from 1978's "Betrayal" to 1996's "Ashes to Ashes." It marks the end of his more "traditional" pieces and ushers in the era of his concern, sparked by the horrors of El Salvador and Turkey, for human rights abuses and government oppression.

The opening play, "Betrayal," is one of Pinter's most innovative works. Each act of the play takes place chronologically before the previous, resulting in a backward hunt for the source of an adulterous relationship. While ostensibly about adultery, the play really deals with the various kind of betrayal that human beings face: betrayal to friends, betrayal to family, and even betrayal of self. "A Kind of Alaska" is an idiosyncratic play based on Oliver Sacks's novel AWAKENINGS which treats a woman's cure from sleeping sickness. It is one of the most enigmatic of Pinter's plays, and I still do not feel as if I get it.

With "Mountain Language," Pinter created his first overtly political piece. "Mountain Language" is without partisan bias or personal attacks, and doesn't even try to present an opposing voice, it simply introduces a setting of harrowing totalitarianism and allows oppressive rule to prove itself evil. In "The New World Order" and "Party Time," Pinter shows oppression occuring in the democratic first world among the upper-middle class, precisely where one would not expect it, in order to make the spectator or reader think about his nation's contributions to oppression. But Pinter's playwriter remains intensely focused on personal actions; by the volume's final play, "Ashes to Ashes," national policy really isn't really what's being attacked, but it instead forms the mere backdrop for an exploration of individual Man's cruelty to his fellow human being.

If Pinter's politics leave you displeased, this fourth volume of his collected plays is not for you. But for play-lovers who think that with his political engagement Pinter has entered a brilliant second phase of his playwriting life, HAROLD PINTER: PLAYS 4 is a must-have.