Dramatically depicts a government mental institution, ostensibly run to help the mentally ill, that is caught up in corruption and an ironic disregard for human life.

Born in London in 1930, Harold Pinter holds an undisputed place in the front ranks of contemporary playwrights. These two plays, Party Time and The New World Order, work in chilling tandem, each demonstrating the inevitable brutality that comes with a total conviction of right. Party Time is a terrifying portrait of the culpable indifference of a privileged class, of the cruelty engendered in its members by political disruption, and of their merciless extinction of dissent. At an elegant cocktail party, a stylish bourgeoisie discusses country clubs and summer homes, while below in the streets a sinister military presence protects them from the unmentionable horrors of poverty, vulgarity, squalor. In The New World Order, two interrogators harass a man whom they condemn for his questioning of received ideas, and whom we know only as threat to their closed vision of democracy.

This volume contains Harold Pinter's first six plays, including The Birthday Party. The Birthday Party Stanley Webber is visited in his boarding house by two strangers, Goldberg and McCann. An innocent-seeming birthday party for Stanley turns into a nightmare. 'Mr Pinter's terrifying blend of pathos and hatred fuses unforgettably into the stuff of art.' Sunday Times The Room and The Dumb Waiter In these two early one-act plays, Harold Pinter reveals himself as already in full control of his unique ability to make dramatic poetry of the banalities of everyday speech and the precision with which it defines character. 'Harold Pinter is the most original writer to have emerged from the "new wave" of dramatists who gave fresh life to the British theatre in the fifties and early sixties.' The Times The Hothouse The Hothouse was first produced in 1980, though Harold Pinter wrote the play in 1958, just before commencing work on The Caretaker. In this compelling study of bureaucratic power, we can see the full emergence of a great and original dramatic talent. ' The Hothouse is at once sinister and hilarious, suggesting an unholy alliance of Kafka and Feydeau.' Spectator

THE STORY: The scene is a government institution, possibly mental or medical and presumably penal, where the inmates are kept behind locked gates and are referred to by number rather than name. In charge is Roote, a pompous ex-colonel who is surely