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.
Armchair Theatre is a British television drama anthology series of single plays that ran on the ITV network from 1956 to 1974. It was originally produced by ABC Weekend TV. Its successor Thames Television took over from mid-1968.
John Richard Hopkins was an English film, stage, and television writer.
John Barry Foster was an English actor who had an extensive career in film, radio, stage and television over almost 50 years. He was best known for portraying the title character in the British crime series Van der Valk (1972–1992) and Bob Rusk in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972).
Mixed Doubles: An Entertainment on Marriage is a programme consisting of a series of eight short plays or revue sketches, each with two characters, composed by various English playwrights. It was first performed on 6 February 1969 in the Hampstead Theatre Club with the title, We Who Are About To.... The programme was then presented as Mixed Doubles: An Entertainment on Marriage at the Comedy Theatre, London, on 9 April 1969.
Family Voices is a radio play by Harold Pinter written in 1980 and first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 22 January 1981.
Michael John Bakewell was a British radio and television producer.
Nicola Mary Pagett Scott, known professionally as Nicola Pagett, was a British actress, known for her role as Elizabeth Bellamy in the 1970s TV drama series Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–1973), as well as being one of the leads in the sitcom Ain't Misbehavin' (1994–1995). Her film appearances included Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), Operation Daybreak (1975), Privates on Parade (1982) and An Awfully Big Adventure (1995).
John Ronane was a British actor.
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.
Quartermaine's Terms is a play by Simon Gray which won The Cheltenham Prize in 1982.
A Night Out is a play written by Harold Pinter in 1959.
Night is a dramatic sketch by the English playwright Harold Pinter, presented as one of eight short dramatic works about marriage in the program Mixed Doubles: An Entertainment on Marriage at the Comedy Theatre, London, on 9 April 1969; directed by Alexander Doré, this production included Nigel Stock as the Man and Pinter's first wife, Vivien Merchant, as the Woman (54). It replaced another sketch performed previously in the program We Who Are About To... at the Hampstead Theatre Club on 6 February 1969; each of the original eight sketches about marriage also featured two characters.
Mary Elizabeth Miller was an English television and stage actress, who was a founding member of the National Theatre Company in 1963.
The Caretaker is a 1963 British drama film directed by Clive Donner and starring Alan Bates, Donald Pleasence and Robert Shaw. It was based on the Harold Pinter play of the same name.
The Rear Column is a play by Simon Gray set in the jungle of the Congo Free State in 1887–88. The story begins after explorer Henry Morton Stanley, has gone to relieve Emin Pasha, governor of Equatoria, from a siege by Mahdist forces. He leaves behind him a 'rear column' with supplies at the Yambuya camp on the Aruwimi River and instructs them to wait until the Arab slave trader, Tippu Tib, has brought 600 more porters before following on to Equatoria. The play follows the story of the men left waiting in the camp. The officers depicted in the play are based on historical figures.
Joan Kemp-Welch was a British stage and film actress, who later went on to become a television director. After making her stage debut in 1926 at the Q Theatre, Kemp-Welch made her film debut in 1933 and appeared in fifteen films over the next decade largely in supporting or minor roles. Occasionally she played more substantial parts as in Hard Steel and They Flew Alone.
Night School is a play by Harold Pinter presented on television in 1960. It was first published in 1961. The plot focuses on a man returning home from prison to find his room being rented out to a tenant. As customary with most of Pinter's works, the play features many aspects of Comedy of menace.
Trouble in the Works (1959) is a comedy sketch by Harold Pinter. The sketch has two characters, Mr. Fibbs and Wills. The play takes place in an office, where Wills has been called into Mr. Fibbs' office to tell him why the workers are unhappy. According to Mr. Fibbs, his workers are treated very well and he can't seem to understand why his workers are so unhappy. Wills explains to him that though the workers are treated well, they have turned against the products that they make. The majority of the rest of the show is the two going back and forth on which products the workers no longer like. At the end, Mr. Fibbs asks what the workers would rather make, and Wills answers, "Brandy balls".
