Rose and Bert rent a room that might almost be a paleolithic cave; the outside is terrifying and unknown. Rose never goes out, Bert only goes to drive his van with furious aggression. A young couple call, and then a blind black man. Bert comes home, massive with triumph at smashing every car that challenged his van. Finding the stranger he kicks him to death and Rose goes blind.

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?

Harold Pinter has long been acknowledged as one of the most influential playwrights in contemporary theatre; his arresting and original works have left a lasting imprint on the development of the stage and screen while delighting audiences around the world. This, the first of four volumes, contains his first five plays, including The Birthday Party (1958), his first full-length drama; as well as two short stories--"The Black and White" and "The Examination"--both written before Pinter turned to the theatre. Pinter's exacting and complex use of language and the features that mark his "comedies of menace" are clearly realized in these plays and stories. His speech "Writing for the Theatre" introduces the volume and establishes the context for those early years.

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.

Flora and Edward invite the match seller into their home. The match seller is silent; faced with this silence, Edward destroys himself while Flora gains strength, until finally Flora turns Edward out with the tray of matches. The midsummer's day which began with Edward having a 'slight ache' ends in his total disintegration.

Albert finds himself dominated by his mother. At an office party he is mercilessly teased by his colleagues and arrives home, his temper rising. When his mother nags he attacks and leaves her, gets picked up by a girl and is able to reduce her to humble servility. Yet, when he arrives home his mother is there fully recovered and ready to reassert her dominance.

Focusing on the brutalities of a society which forbids a minority of its population to speak in their own language, it is a play of few words which add up to an eloquent indictment of the banning of any human utterance.'

The Controller of a radio-cab firm is trying to contact Driver 274 and get him to pick up a fare at Victoria Station.

Written as a series of monologues featuring an exchange of letters between a mother and her absent son. The mother's desperate attempts to bring her son back to her from his lodgings in a sleazy London boarding house become more ill-attuned, serving only to accentuate the irreparable rift between them.

Deborah was a lively 16-year-old and part of a close-knit family when she fell victim to sleeping sickness. Twenty-nine years later, having been watched over throughout by the same doctor, she comes to life and gradually tries to adjust to the world around her.

Stella returns from her dress collection in Leeds to tell James, her husband, that she has been unfaithful. James confronts Bill, pressing for the truth, already determined to believe the worst. Bill confesses that he and Stella had only talked about spending the night together. It had amused him to perpetuate Stella's story - to hurt his friend Harry. Is this the truth? Stella is silent.

When I was fourteen I happened to meet the celebrated drama critic, Jack Kroll. We were in his New York office at Newsweek when he asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I told him I'd like to write plays, if I could.

"Would you now?" He handed me a Grove Press edition of Pinter: Plays One and said, "You'd better have this then".

In 1995 my first play was put on at the National Theatre

One night, I was knocking around the lighting box just before curtain up, "Anyone in?"

The Deputy Stage Manager, said, "Harold Pinter".

"Yeah, yeah".

"No, really".

A few days later I received a little note from him, congratulating me on the play. I kept the note in my breast pocket for a month.

In May of 1999 we had lunch. Harold wore a black shirt and drank white wine. In fact, we drank a fair amount of white wine together. I'd put it about, via our mutual agent, Judy Daish, that I'd be pretty keen to direct The Caretaker and word came back that Harold would not be averse. So we discussed the play in an adult fashion, director to play-wright. I wondered when someone was going to tap me on the shoulder and wake me from this fantasy.

A month or two later I called Harold to discuss some bit of production business. He came to the phone, full of beans.

"Hallo, Harold. You sound well".

He told me that he was "well" and that he was writing a new play. He spoke like a man who had never written a play before, thrilled and delighted that the words were flowing. I was stabbing around in the dark with a new one. Harold asked after it delicately; he treated me like a fellow writer, as if all writers are equals, all prone to the same problems.

When I directed my second play, Closer, onBroadway, Jack Kroll came to interview me for Newsweek magazine. We chatted away in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel where I was staying. I told him he'd given me a book some twenty years ago and that it had been more than useful. He was delighted. He spoke at some length and with great admiration for and about Harold's work.

Jack Kroll died this summer.

It was an honour to have met him.

The book he had given me was upstairs in my hotel room.

Why would I ever part with it?

It's here on my desk, as I write.

Into his derelict household shrine Aston brings Davies, a tramp - but a tramp with pretensions, even if to the world he may be a pathetic old creature. All that is left of his past now is the existence in Sidcup of some papers, papers that will prove exactly who he is and enable him to start again. Aston, too, has his dreams: he has always been good with his hands and there is so much to do in the house. Aston's hopes are tied to his flash brother Mick's; he has aspirations to live in a luxurious apartment. Human nature is a great spoiler of plans, however ...

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 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

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.

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.

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

'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.

Set against the decayed elegance of a house in London's Hampstead Heath, in No Man's Land two men face each other over a drink. Do they know each other, or is each performing an elaborate character of recognition? Their ambiguity--and the comedy--intensify with the arrival of two younger men, the one ostensibly a manservant, the other a male secretary. All four inhabit a no man's land between time present and time remembered, between reality and imagination--a territory which Pinter explores with his characteristic mixture of biting wit, aggression, and anarchic sexuality.

In the early 1970s Harold Pinter joined forces with director Joseph Losey and Proust scholar Barbara Bray to develop a screenplay of Proust's masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past. Pinter took more than a year to conceive and write the screenplay and called the experience "the best working year of my life." Although never produced, Harold Pinter's The Proust Screenplay is considered one of the greatest adaptations for the cinema ever written.

With fidelity to Proust's text, the screenplay is an extraordinary re-creation by one of the leading playwrights of our time. It is, in its way, a unique collaboration between two extraordinary writers united across more than half a century and two different cultures by a special concern for time and memory.

For more than twenty years, Mel Gussow, a drama critic for the New York Times, has been meeting Harold Pinter to talk about work and life, plays and people. At the core of this book is a series of lengthy interviews - some of the most extensive that Pinter has ever given - all published here in full for the first time. Pinter and Gussow first meet in 1971, when Old Times is a new play and Pinter's status as a major writer is still being confirmed. Then come public and private conversations in the eighties, when the voice of Pinter's political commitment is first heard. And finally, over a period of a week in September 1993, the two talk after the London premiere of Pinter's latest play, Moonlight. Here the playwright is in a more mellow mood, happy to contemplate his early life and to admit to a political agenda behind such plays as The Birthday Party. Through these and other revealing insights, he allows us to see the complete arc of his work to date in its true light. The resulting book is one of the most thoughtful and intimate portraits of the writer yet to appear. In fact, it is a kind of self-portrait, since, intentionally, it is Pinter who does most of the talking. Though famously reticent on the subjects of his work and his private life, Pinter opens up for Gussow in a manner both beguilingly frank and refreshingly informative.

An essential collection for any admirer of Harold Pinter, this brand-new, updated edition of his own selection of his poems and prose includes three never-before-published pieces, the most recent of which he wrote in January 1995. Included are love poems, political diatribes, short stories, character portraits. Some are intimately connected with plays; others are intriguingly allusive, and all of them share Pinter's lean, taut, and sometimes jarringly original use of language. Katherine Burkman has said that "like Shakespeare, Pinter is a poet," and in this single volume we see that Harold Pinter is not only, as Irving Wardle has written in the London Times, "our best living playwright" but one of the most accomplished writers in the English language today.

Along with Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter holds an undisputed place in the front ranks of contemporary dramatists. In volume two of his collected works, the plays and revue sketches mark a period of transition, as Pinter's characters and settings become more recognizably realistic, in contrast to the absurdist atmosphere of his earlier work. The Caretaker, which first brought him fame on both sides of the Atlantic, was called "a play of strangely compelling beauty and passion" by Howard Taubman of The New York Times. An essay by Pinter, "Writing for Myself," introduces this collection.