Overview

In 1958 The Birthday Party was dismissed by all but a few critics and closed after one week's run in London. Since then Harold Pinter has come to be acknowledged as ""our best living playwright"" (Irving Wardle, The Times) Martin Esslin's study of Pinter's plays has become a standard work since its publication in 1970. This sixth, revised edition - published to mark Pinter's 70th birthday and updated to cover his most recent plays, Moonlight, Ashes to Ashes and Celebration - offers a comprehensive survey of the whole span of Harold Pinter's writing career by one of the most distinguished commentators on modern theatre. ""It will certainly not be the last book on Pinter, but seems bound to remain one of the best"" John Russell Taylor ""Holds its place as the most straightforwardly useful account of Pinter's work to date"" Times Literary Supplement

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9780413668608

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Reviews

First published 30 years ago, Esslin's standard study of Harold Pinter's dramatic oeuvre has been reissued in a sixth edition to mark the occasion of the playwright's 70th birthday. At the time of the book's original publication Pinter was still a relatively youthful writer with his career in the ascendant; today he is an established figure, widely considered one of our best living playwrights. His enigmatic, often apparently ambivalent plays tantalize where they once simply bewildered. Opening with a useful and extensive chronology, the book chronicles a distinctive career from Pinter's first play The Birthday Party in 1957, The Caretaker and The Homecoming plus screenplays of the calibre of The Servant and Accident and latterly Moonlight, Celebration and Ashes to Ashes. Esslin offers a comprehensive overview of Pinter's work, which is followed by a detailed critique of each individual play, concluding with a stimulating summation of Pinter's singular contribution to the contemporary theatre. Thoughtful, lucid and accessible, student and scholar alike will find much of assistance here. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Martin Esslin was the author of such ground-breaking classics as The Theatre of the Absurd and Brecht: A Choice of Evils, as well as The Field of Drama in which he focused on the semiology of drama. He joined the BBC in 1940 and was head of Drama (Radio) from 1963-1977. He published many collections of essays including Brief Chronicles: Essays on Modern Drama and Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett and the Media. His critical articles used to appear regularly in Plays and Players, Encounters and many other periodicals. He was also a well-known translator of plays, particularly by German-speaking dramatists. He died in 2012.

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