Celebration & The Room - Softcover

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.

About the Author

Harold Pinter was born in London in 1930. He lived with Antonia Fraser from 1975 and they married in 1980. In 1995 he won the David Cohen British Literature Prize, awarded for a lifetime's achievement in literature. In 1996 he was given the Laurence Olivier Award for a lifetime's achievement in theatre. In 2002 he was made a Companion of Honour for services to literature. In 2005 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and, in the same year, the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry and the Franz Kafka Award (Prague). In 2006 he was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize and, in 2007, the highest French honour, the Légion d'honneur. He died in December 2008.