Pinter in Play provides a survey of diverse readings of the Harold Pinter canon organized around and presented in terms of the major critical schools of the past twenty-five years, from New Criticism to deconstruction to poststructuralism. Reflecting on the cultural, personal, sociological, and philosophical contexts of these diverse critical perspectives and the critics who express them, this book is equally about the act or the art of literary criticism and itself an important work of literary criticism. Drawing on interviews with Pinter scholars, Susan Hollis Merritt shows how critics "play" with Pinter and thereby seriously enforce personal, professional, and political affiliations. Cutting across traditional academic and nonacademic boundaries, Merritt argues that greater cooperation and collaboration among critics can resolve conflicts, promote greater social equity, and foster ameliorative critical and cultural change.

Presents selections of the work of playwright Harold Pinter. Includes key plays, poetry, and the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature lecture.

THE STORY: A husband goes to his office politely asking if his wife's lover will be coming today. She murmurs 'Mmmm,' and suggests he not return before six. In order not to return before six he will no doubt visit a prostitute. A competition is glossily established. When the lover does come, he is the husband, which is not surprising. The kind of sex-play follows that suggests this is the necessary titillation, and the necessary release ofhostility, between a man who means to be master of the house and a wife who means to be both wife and mistress, whatever the house may be. But there is a flaw in the accommodation. The lover is weary of his mistress; she is no longer particularly appetizing. By the time he returns, as husband, in the evening, his wife is still disturbed by the news. The performance of the afternoon has begun to carry over into the reality (or pretense) of the evening. Suddenly the husband is not quite husband, diffident over his drink. He is blurring into the lover, at the wrong hour, and angrily. The wife must seduce him now as wife, not as mistress. She does. -NY Herald-Tribune.

This volume contains the complete short plays of Harold Pinter from The Room, first performed in 1960, to Celebration, which premiered in 2000.The book commemorates the tenth anniversary of the playwright's death and coincides with Pinter at the Pinter, a celebratory season staging twenty of his one-act plays at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London, 2018.With a foreword by Antonia Fraser. 'The foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century.' Swedish Academy citation on awarding Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize in Literature, 2005.

Scolnicov highlights Harold Pinter as an experimental playwright who attempted to free the theatre from the legacy of realism, causality, and motivation.