 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2009) |
Family Voices is a radio play by Harold Pinter written in 1980 and first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 22 January 1981.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2009) |
Family Voices is a radio play by Harold Pinter written in 1980 and first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 22 January 1981.
Family Voices exposes the story of a mother, son, and dead husband and father through a series of letters that the mother and son have written to one another and that each speaks aloud. The son has moved off to the city and is surrounded by odd characters and circumstances. The mother, who apparently never receives her son's letters, questions angrily why her son never responds to her letters, and brings news of his father's death. Towards the end of the play, the father speaks as it were from the grave, "Just to keep in touch" (81).
A series of interlocking monologues spoken by three Voices (One, Two, and Three), Family Voices exposes themes involving difficulties of communication, the vicissitudes of memory and the past, and family dysfunction familiar from Pinter's other dramatic works, employing some of Pinter's well-known stylistic traits.[ citation needed ] The peculiar circumstances of the characters evoke the Theatre of the Absurd. The mother and son continually have trouble communicating with each other, resulting in more intense attempts at communication that only serve to make the situation more absurd.[ citation needed ]
It was first broadcast as a radio play on BBC Radio 3 on 22 January 1981. Directed by Sir Peter Hall, the cast included:
Subsequently, it was presented in a "platform performance" directed by Hall at London's Cottesloe Theatre with the same cast.
In October 1982, it was presented again as part of Other Places, along with two of Pinter's other works, a one-act play A Kind of Alaska and a shorter play Victoria Station , also directed by Hall. For this production, the cast included:
Other theatre personnel were:
It was given lunchtime stage performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Theatre in February and April 1987. The cast included:
Another theatrical trilogy entitled Other Places, with Pinter's then-newer play One for the Road (1984) instead of Family Voices, was directed by Alan Schneider, in New York City. (This production is not listed on Pinter's official website.)
The play received its West End premiere as part of the Pinter at the Pinter season at the Harold Pinter Theatre in December 2018, directed by Patrick Marber. The cast included:
The play was first published in the United Kingdom in a spiral binding by Next Editions in 1981, with illustrations by artist Guy Vaesen, a family friend of Harold Pinter and Vivien Merchant, Pinter's first wife (Baker and Ross 85; Billingon, Harold Pinter 134–35).
Later, in 1983, it was published in a volume entitled Other Places, along with A Kind of Alaska and Victoria Station , by Grove Press, Pinter's American publisher, in both hardback and paperback editions (Baker and Ross 85–90).
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
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.
Sir Michael John Gambon is an Irish-English actor. Gambon started his acting career with Laurence Olivier as one of the original members of the Royal National Theatre. Over his six decade long career he has received three Olivier Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and four BAFTA Awards. In 1999 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for services to drama.
No Man's Land is a play by Harold Pinter written in 1974 and first produced and published in 1975. Its original production was at the Old Vic theatre in London by the National Theatre on 23 April 1975, and it later transferred to Wyndham's Theatre, July 1975 – January 1976, the Lyttelton Theatre April–May 1976, and New York's Longacre Theatre from October–December 1976. It returned to the Lyttelton from January – February 1977. It is a two-act play.
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.
The Caretaker is a drama 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".
Marilyn J. "Lynn" Farleigh is an English actress of stage and screen.
Tea Party is a play written by Harold Pinter, which Pinter adapted from his own 1963 short story of the same title. As a screenplay, it was commissioned by the European Broadcasting Union, directed by Charles Jarrott, and first transmitted on BBC Television in the programme The Largest Theatre in the World on 25 March 1965. It was first produced on stage in October 1968 as part of a double bill with Pinter's play The Basement.
Frederick Simon Treves is an English actor, director and writer, best known for playing Harold 'Stinker' Pinker in three series of ITV's Jeeves and Wooster. In 2018 he played Aleister Crowley in the short film Boca do Inferno, directed by Luis Porto and shot in Porto and Cascais, Portugal.
The Hothouse (1958/1980) is a full-length tragicomedy written by Harold Pinter in the winter of 1958 between The Birthday Party (1957) and The Caretaker (1959). After writing The Hothouse in the winter of 1958 and following the initial commercial failure of The Birthday Party, Pinter put the play aside; in 1979 he re-read it and directed its first production, at Hampstead Theatre, where it opened on 24 April 1980, transferring to the Ambassadors Theatre on 25 June 1980, and it was first published, also in 1980, by Eyre Methuen. The play received its American premiere at the Trinity Repertory Company in 1982. Pinter himself played Roote in a subsequent production staged at the Minerva Theatre, in Chichester, in 1995, later transferring to the Comedy Theatre, in London.
Victoria Station is a short play for two actors by the English playwright Harold Pinter.
Twelve Angry Men is a play by Reginald Rose adapted from his 1954 teleplay of the same title for the CBS Studio One anthology television series. Staged first in San Francisco in 1955, the Broadway debut came 50 years after CBS aired the play, on October 28, 2004, by the Roundabout Theatre Company at the American Airlines Theatre, where it ran for 328 performances.
Remembrance of Things Past is the 2000 collaborative stage adaptation by Harold Pinter and director Di Trevis of Harold Pinter's as-yet unproduced The Proust Screenplay (1977), a screen adaptation of À la recherche du temps perdu, the 1913–1927 seven-volume novel by Marcel Proust.
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.
A Kind of Alaska is a one-act play written in 1982 by British playwright Harold Pinter.
Kevin Elyot was a British playwright, screenwriter and actor. His most notable works include the play My Night with Reg (1994) and the film Clapham Junction (2007). His stage work has been performed by leading theatre companies including the Royal Court, National Theatre, Bush Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Donmar Warehouse and in the West End. He finished his final play, Twilight Song, not long before he died in 2014, which received a posthumous premiere at London's Park Theatre in 2017.
Sian Clifford is an English actress. She is best known for playing Claire, the older sister of the titular character in the BBC comedy-drama series Fleabag (2016–2019) and also portrayed Martha Crawley in the ITV/Amazon Studios series Vanity Fair (2018). In 2020, she played Diana Ingram in the ITV series Quiz.