Stanley Webber is visited in his boarding house by strangers, Goldberg and McCann. An innocent-seeming birthday party for Stanley turns into a nightmare. The Birthday Party was first performed in 1958 and is now a modern classic, produced and studied throughout the world.

Harry Burton directs this Channel 4 documentary offering an insight into the mind and working processes of playwright and essayist Harold Pinter.

This revised third volume of Harold Pinter's work includes The Homecoming, Old Times, No Man's Land, four shorter plays, six revue sketches and a short story. It also contains the speech given by Pinter in 1970 on being awarded the German Shakespeare Prize. The Homecoming 'Of all Harold Pinter's major plays, The Homecoming has the most powerful narrative line... You are fascinated, lured on, sucked into the vortex.' Sunday Telegraph 'The most intense expression of compressed violence to be found anywhere in Pinter's plays.' The Times Old Times 'A rare quality of high tension is evident, revealing in Old Times a beautifully controlled and expressive formality that has seldom been achieved since the plays of Racine.' Financial Times 'Harold Pinter's poetic, Proustian Old Times has the inscrutability of a mysterious picture, and the tension of a good thriller.' Independent No Man's Land 'The work of our best living playwright in its command of the language and its power to erect a coherent structure in a twilight zone of confusion and dismay.' The Times

'Betrayal is a new departure and a bold one . . . Pinter has found a way of making memory active and dramatic, giving an audience the experience of the mind's accelerating momentum as it pieces together the past with a combination of curiosity and regret. He shows man betrayed not only by man, but by time - a recurring theme which has found its proper scenic correlative . . . Pinter captures the psyche's sly manoeuvres for self-respect with a sardonic forgiveness . . . a master craftsman honouring his talent by setting it new, difficult tasks' New Society 'There is hardly a line into which desire, pain, alarm, sorrow, rage or some kind of blend of feelings has not been compressed, like volatile gas in a cylinder less stable than it looks . . . Pinter's narrative method takes "what's next?" out of the spectator's and replaces it with the rather deeper "how?" and "why?" Why did love pass? How did these people cope with the lies, the evasions, the sudden dangers, panic and the contradictory feelings behind their own deftly engineered masks? The play's subject is not sex, not even adultery, but the politics of betrayal and the damage it inflicts on all involved.' The Times First staged at the National Theatre in 1978, Betrayal was revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, in 1991. Twenty years after its first showing, it returned to the National in 1998.

Gus and Ben are on the job, waiting and listening. Into the waiting silence rattles the dumb waiter with extraordinary demands for dishes they cannot supply - and who is operating the dumb waiter in an empty house? In a while their victim will come and they will know what to do.

'What would Harold have thought of Trump?' People are always asking me that question. (He died in 2008, eight years before Trump's election.) Now we know. As it were. - Antonia Fraser 'The foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century.' From the Swedish Academy citation on awarding Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2005 The Pres and an Officer was discovered by Antonia Fraser in autumn 2017 on one of the yellow pads Harold Pinter used for writing.

It was with this play that Harold Pinter had his first major success, and its production history since it was first performed in 1960 has established the work as a landmark in twentieth-century drama. The obsessive caretaker, Davies, whose papers are in Sidcup, is a classic comic creation, and his uneasy relationship with the enigmatic Aston and Mick established the author's individuality with an international audience.

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 Room, The Dumb Waiter, A Slight Ache, A Night Out, Night School, The Collection, The Dwarfs, The Lover, Tea Party, The Basement, Landscape, Silence, Monologue, Family Voices, A Kind of Alaska, Victoria Station, One for the Road, Mountain Language, The New World Order, Party Time, Moonlight, Ashes to Ashes, Celebration 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.

Originally written in 1950, then revised and first published in 1992, The Dwarfs is Harold Pinter's only novel. Set in postwar Britain, The Dwarfs describes the intertwined lives and concerns of four young Londoners: Len, working at the Euston train station but fascinated by abstract mathematics; Mark, a sometime actor; and Virginia and Pete, a young couple trying to define their relationship amid the powerful, sometimes destructive forces at work among the four. In the evolution of this quadrilateral friendship and the strains it creates, Harold Pinter explores how ordinary lives are molded by the limitations and boundaries of sexuality, intimacy, and mortality. It is a world populated by dwarfs--young people who have departed, only to leave emptiness. Funny, vivid, and haunting, The Dwarfs is a brilliantly intriguing and chillingly perceptive novel by a writer whose imagination has shaped our lives.

'An exultant night - a man in total command of his talent.' Observer 'The most intense expression of compressed violence to be found anywhere in Pinter's plays.' The Times When Teddy, a professor in an American university, brings his wife Ruth to visit his old home in London, he finds his family still living in the house. In the conflict that follows, it is Ruth who becomes the focus of the family's struggle for supremacy.

Old Times was first presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, London, on 1 June 1971. It was revived at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in July 2004. 'Old Times is a joyous, wonderful play that people will talk about as long as we have a theatre.' New York Times 'What am I writing about? Not the weasel under the cocktail cabinet . . . I can sum up none of my plays. I can describe none of them, except to say: that is what happened. This is what they said. That is what they did.' Harold Pinter

Stanley Webber is visited in his boarding house by strangers, Goldberg and McCann. An innocent-seeming birthday party for Stanley turns into a nightmare. The Birthday Party was first performed in 1958 and is now a modern classic, produced and studied throughout the world.

The second volume of Harold Pinter's collected work includes The Caretaker. The Caretaker It was with this play that Harold Pinter had his first major success. The obsessive caretaker, Davies, is a classic comic creation, and his uneasy relationship with the enigmatic Aston and Mick a landmark in twentieth-century drama. 'The play remains a masterpiece.' Daily Telegraph The Collection This one-act play for television explores the sexual manoeuvres between two couples in the clothing trade. 'Taps the adrenal flow of contemporary guilt and anxiety.' Time The Lover Richard and Sarah conduct themselves with apparent respectability in the mornings, whilst living out a sequence of erotic rituals in the afternoons. 'Beautifully written... the sexiest play I remember seeing on the television.' Sunday Times The volume also includes Night School and The Dwarfs, plus five revue sketches written during the same period.

This revised third volume of Harold Pinter's work includes The Homecoming, Old Times, No Man's Land, four shorter plays, six revue sketches and a short story. It also contains the speech given by Pinter in 1970 on being awarded the German Shakespeare Prize. The Homecoming 'Of all Harold Pinter's major plays, The Homecoming has the most powerful narrative line... You are fascinated, lured on, sucked into the vortex.' Sunday Telegraph 'The most intense expression of compressed violence to be found anywhere in Pinter's plays.' The Times Old Times 'A rare quality of high tension is evident, revealing in Old Times a beautifully controlled and expressive formality that has seldom been achieved since the plays of Racine.' Financial Times 'Harold Pinter's poetic, Proustian Old Times has the inscrutability of a mysterious picture, and the tension of a good thriller.' Independent No Man's Land 'The work of our best living playwright in its command of the language and its power to erect a coherent structure in a twilight zone of confusion and dismay.' The Times

Harold Pinter's Betrayal received its premiere at the National Theatre, London, in November 1978. After an initially guarded critical response, the work was rapidly revaluated and won the Olivier Award for Best New Play the following year. Set in London and Venice the play has an innovative chronology that opens at the end of an affair and works its way backwards over nine years, from 1977 to 1968. It is widely considered one of the playwright's pivotal works.

Eight short plays: Triangle, Gladly Otherwise, The Black and White, Trouble in the Works, Cleaning Up Justice, Collector's Piece, Conference and Can You Hear Me?

'The work of our best living playwright in its command of the language and its power to erect a coherent structure in a twilight zone of confusion and dismay.' The Times Do Hirst and Spooner really know each other, or are they performing an elaborate charade? The ambiguity - and the comedy - intensify with the arrival of Briggs and Foster. All four inhabit a no-man's-land between time present and a time remembered, between reality and imagination. No Man's Land was first presented at the National Theatre at the Old Vic, London, in 1975, revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, with Harold Pinter as Hirst and revived by the National Theatre, directed by Harold Pinter, in 2001.

A restaurant. Two curved banquettes. It's a celebration. "Celebration" is Pinter's new play which displays a vivid zest for life. In "The Room", Pinter's first play, he reveals himself in full control of his ability to make dramatic poetry of the banalities of everyday speech.

Celebrating the art of the poet-translator, this pioneering anthology shows how the very heart of the English tradition has been sustained and enriched by translation over the centuries. The three editors have gathered together supreme examples of this art, poems that sing out on the most pressing of human concerns with all the conviction of two voices speaking as one.

During a train journey the editors of this anthology appointed themselves the task of nominating a hundred poets to represent the richness and diversity of English verse over 5 centuries. The result, after several further meetings, is this selection ranging from the familiar to the obscure.

There is no writer who excels at the art of adaptation for the screen so much as Harold Pinter. His consummate skill and unerring ear for dialogue, coupled with his sensitivity and understanding of the work of other authors, make these three volumes a collective masterclass in screenwriting. Everyone who values the word and loves film will savour and enjoy this wide range of work with the distinctive Pinter hallmark.