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The Collection is a 1961 play by Harold Pinter featuring two couples, James and Stella and Harry and Bill. It is a comedy laced with typically "Pinteresque" ambiguity and "implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses" ( Oxford English Dictionary ).
The Collection takes place on a divided stage, shared by a house in London's Belgravia, and a flat in Chelsea, with another space between them where telephone calls take place; according to Pinter's stage description, the "three areas" comprise "two peninsulas and a promontory" (Three Plays [43]).
Bill, a dress designer in his twenties, lives with Harry, a man in his forties, in Harry's house, in Belgravia, which has "Elegant decor" (Three Plays [43]). Stella, another dress designer, in her thirties like her husband and business partner James, lives with him in "James' flat" in Chelsea, which has "Tasteful contemporary furnishing." According to Pinter's stage description, whereas the set for Harry's house ("Stage left") "comprises the living-room, hall, front door and staircase to the first floor," with a "Kitchen exit below staircase," the set for James's flat in Chelsea ("Stage right") "comprises the living-room only," while "Off stage right" there are "other rooms and front door" and "Up stage centre on promontory [a] telephone box," where the phone calls are made (Three Plays [43]).
One evening while at home Harry (Kane) and Bill (Lloyd), a dress designer, receive an unsettling anonymous phone call, which is to be followed by a further unsettling visit from a man who will refuse to leave his name . Following some apparently trivial conversation between Stella, another dress designer, and James (Horne), her husband and business partner, that occurs in his flat, James has left it to call on Bill at Harry's house, revealing that he was the anonymous caller and is the unexpected visitor. James confronts Bill with the confession of his wife Stella that she has had a one-night affair with Bill in her hotel room. Bill first claims that she invented the story. He later admits to their having "kissed a bit", but insists he never went to Stella's room. He further renders that version ambiguous when James remembers calling Stella in her hotel room:
JAMES: [...] Then I phoned.
Pause.
I spoke to her. [...] You were sitting on the bed, next to her.BILL: Not sitting. Lying.
James's obsession to meet the man who has purportedly cuckolded him––suggesting archetypal symbolic significance in Pinter's choice of his surname (Horne)–– and to confront him with "the truth" culminates in a "mock duel" with household knives, in which Bill is scarred. Harry then intervenes and relates to James Stella's alleged admission that she has invented the whole story and the two never really met (in fact, what she has told him is that James was the one who "dreamed it up"). Bill confirms that nothing happened, and Harry viciously chastises him, calling him a "slum slug" with a "slum mind" and claiming that he "confirms stupid sordid little stories just to amuse himself, while everyone else has to run round in circles to get to the root of the matter and smooth the whole thing out". As James is about to leave, Bill suddenly changes his story for the last time and tells James: "we sat ... in the lounge, on a sofa for two hours ... talked we talked about it ... we didn't move from the lounge never went to her room ... just talked about what we would do ... if we did get to her room two hours ... we never touched ... we just talked about it." James then goes back home and confronts his wife with this final version of "the truth"––
You didn't do anything, did you?
Pause.
That's the truth, isn't it?
Pause.
You just sat and talked about what you would do, if you went to your room. That's what you did.
Pause.
Didn't you?
Pause.That's the truth . . . isn't it?"––
Stella never responds.
Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works.
Ada Brand Thomson, known professionally as Vivien Merchant, was an English actress. She began her career in 1942, and became known for dramatic roles on stage and in films. In 1956 she married the playwright Harold Pinter and performed in many of his plays.
The Dumb Waiter is a one-act play by Harold Pinter written in 1957.
Stella Nina McCartney is an English fashion designer. She is a daughter of English singer-songwriter Sir Paul McCartney and his late wife, American photographer, musician, and animal rights activist Linda McCartney. Like her parents, McCartney is a firm supporter of animal rights, environmentalism and is particularly known for her use of vegetarian and animal-free alternatives in her work.
Old Times is a play by the Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter. It was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in London on 1 June 1971. It starred Colin Blakely, Dorothy Tutin, and Vivien Merchant, and was directed by Peter Hall. The play was dedicated to Hall to celebrate his 40th birthday.
The Birthday Party (1957) is the first full-length play by Harold Pinter, first published in London by Encore Publishing in 1959. It is one of his best-known and most frequently performed plays.
Betrayal is a play written by Harold Pinter in 1978. Critically regarded as one of the English playwright's major dramatic works, it features his characteristically economical dialogue, characters' hidden emotions and veiled motivations, and their self-absorbed competitive one-upmanship, face-saving, dishonesty, and (self-)deceptions.
One for the Road is an overtly-political one-act play by Harold Pinter, which premiered at Lyric Studio, Hammersmith, in London, on 13 March 1984, and was first published by Methuen in 1984. Pinter's One for the Road is not to be confused with the Willy Russell play of the same name.
The Lover is a 1962 one-act play by Harold Pinter, originally written for television, but subsequently performed on stage. The play contrasts bourgeois domesticity with sexual yearning.
The Caretaker is a play in three acts by Harold Pinter. Although it was the sixth of his major works for stage and television, this psychological study of the confluence of power, allegiance, innocence, and corruption among two brothers and a tramp, became Pinter's first significant commercial success. It premiered at the Arts Theatre Club in London's West End on 27 April 1960 and transferred to the Duchess Theatre the following month, where it ran for 444 performances before departing London for Broadway. In 1963, a film version of the play based on Pinter's unpublished screenplay was directed by Clive Donner. The movie starred Alan Bates as Mick and Donald Pleasence as Davies in their original stage roles, while Robert Shaw replaced Peter Woodthorpe as Aston. First published by both Encore Publishing and Eyre Methuen in 1960, The Caretaker remains one of Pinter's most celebrated and oft-performed plays.
The Homecoming is a two-act play written in 1964 by Harold Pinter and first published in 1965. Its premières in London (1965) and New York (1967) were both directed by Sir Peter Hall. The original Broadway production won the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play. Its 40th-anniversary Broadway production at the Cort Theatre was nominated for a 2008 Tony Award for "Best Revival of a Play".
The Room is Harold Pinter's first play, written and first produced in 1957. Considered by critics the earliest example of Pinter's "comedy of menace", this play has strong similarities to Pinter's second play, The Birthday Party, including features considered hallmarks of Pinter's early work and of the so-called Pinteresque: dialogue that is comically familiar and yet disturbingly unfamiliar, simultaneously or alternatingly both mundane and frightening; subtle yet contradictory and ambiguous characterizations; a comic yet menacing mood characteristic of mid-twentieth-century English tragicomedy; a plot featuring reversals and surprises that can be both funny and emotionally moving; and an unconventional ending that leaves at least some questions unresolved.
Ashes to Ashes is a 1996 play by English playwright Harold Pinter. It was first performed, in Dutch, by Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the Netherlands' largest repertory company, in Amsterdam, as part of its 1996–1997 season, and directed by Titus Muizelaar, who reprised his production, in Dutch with English surtitles, as part of a double bill with Buff, by Gerardjan Rijnders, at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, from 23 through 27 June 1998. Its English première by the Royal Court Theatre opened after the Dutch première, at the Ambassadors Theatre, in London, on 12 September 1996.
Moonlight is a play written by Harold Pinter, which premiered at the Almeida Theatre, in London, in September 1993.
Bibliography for Harold Pinter is a list of selected published primary works, productions, secondary sources, and other resources related to English playwright Harold Pinter (1930–2008), the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, who was also a screenwriter, actor, director, poet, author, and political activist. It lists works by and works about him, and it serves as the Bibliography for the main article on Harold Pinter and for several articles relating to him and his works.
Characteristics of Harold Pinter's work identifies distinctive aspects of the works of the British playwright Harold Pinter (1930–2008) and gives an indication of their influence on Anglo-American culture.
"Art, Truth and Politics" is the Nobel Lecture delivered on video by the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature Harold Pinter (1930–2008), who was at the time hospitalised and unable to travel to Stockholm to deliver it in person.
Comedy of menace is the body of plays written by David Campton, Nigel Dennis, N. F. Simpson, and Harold Pinter. The term was coined by drama critic Irving Wardle, who borrowed it from the subtitle of Campton's play The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace, in reviewing Pinter's and Campton's plays in Encore in 1958.
The Basement is a television play by Harold Pinter. It was written first as a screenplay for a film, then revised for television and broadcast on 20 February 1967.
The Tragedy of King Lear is an unpublished screenplay by Harold Pinter. It is an adaptation of William Shakespeare's King Lear and was commissioned by actor and director Tim Roth with backing from Film Four. Pinter completed the screenplay on 31 March 2000, but as of 2017 it has not been filmed. It is one of only three screenplays that Pinter adapted from another dramatist's play, the others being his screenplay adaptation of Butley, by his good friend Simon Gray, and Sleuth, originally written for the stage by Anthony Shaffer.