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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". [1]
Trouble in the Works was one of Harold Pinter's earlier works, written in 1959. This is one of a series of short sketch comedy, Sean Foley said, "These are classic comedy sketches, some of them written for revues and cabaret nights, and there's this strain of surrealism...he got there 12 years before Monty Python," (Merritt). [2] Trouble in the Works was written with five other sketches, known as the Revue Sketches. [3] Many of the poems that Pinter wrote that were in more of a dialogue form turned were turned into revue sketches. [4]
From when it was first seen in 1959, not much of this play has been changed. There is one notable change that has been made in many productions, which is the changing of the last line from, "Brandy balls" to "Trouble".
Materialist Theory : This theory is arguably one of the most prevalent theories within the play. Materialist Theory is described as individuals are understood and defined by the products they create; though the workers are defined by the products they make, they have no claim to those products. [5] This is clearly seen in the play as the workers are no longer able to connect with their products. Even though they are treated extremely well by the company, the workers are no longer happy, and this has negatively affected their work and production. Mr. Fibbs claims that several of the products as his own, and given that he is upper management, it would explain the disconnect between the workers and the products.
Reader-Response and Reception Theory Reader-Response and Reception Theory can be defined by how the audience takes what they see or read from a production or play, regardless of the author's original intentions. [6] Pinter wrote with no audience in mind, but merely saw a situation and later wrote about it. Pinter was surprised by how much meaning people extract from his work, when he saw it as very straightforward. [4] Given the different backgrounds, audience members or readers could all take away their own different messages from the play; for example, a working class person may side with the workers in the play, and their hatred of the products, but someone in a higher socioeconomic status might see that the workers are given these great benefits and they are just causing trouble.
Post Modern Theory : Though Pinter is often described within Modernism, there are points of Post Modern Theory that can be applied to Trouble in the Works. One of the points of Post Modernist Theory is a reaction to modernism, which has a focus on the individual, while post modernism recognizes the difficulty of everyone being individuals when there are so many people. [7] In the play, the workers push back against the products to which they don't have claim, and demand something they can get behind. Though they are asserting themselves as individuals, they are doing it as a collective.
The sketch was originally performed on stage in the West End revue One to Another in July 1959. [8]
The Royal National Theatre staged the piece as part of an evening of Pinter's Sketches, on 8 February 2002. [9]
In The Guardian , Michael Billington wrote "Much the funniest is Trouble in the Works in which Patrick Marber's obdurate foreman achieves ascendancy over Corin Redgrave's quivering employer by his linguistic expertise in naming mechanical parts: by the end Marber is smugly behind the boss's desk having achieved a classic Pinter power-reversal." [10]
The sketch, along with 13 others by Pinter, was performed as part of Pinter's People , which opened on 30 January 2007, at London's Haymarket Theatre. [11] [12]
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.
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.
Patrick Albert Crispin Marber is an English comedian, playwright, director, actor, and screenwriter.
Corin William Redgrave was an English actor and left-wing socialist activist.
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.
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.
Applicant is a dramatic sketch written by Harold Pinter. Originally written in 1959 and first published by Eyre Methuen in 1961, it was first broadcast on BBC Radio on the Third Programme "between February and March 1964," along with Pinter's other revue sketches, That's Your Trouble, That's All, Interview, and Dialogue for Three.
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.
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.
Pinter's People is a compilation of revue sketches or short prose works by Harold Pinter, which was performed for four weeks from 30 January 2007, at the Haymarket Theatre, in London, starring Bill Bailey, Geraldine McNulty, Sally Phillips, and Kevin Eldon. The show was assembled by Bailey and directed by Sean Foley.
Victoria Station is a short play for two actors by the English playwright Harold Pinter.
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.
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.
Harold Pinter and academia concerns academic recognition of and scholarship pertaining to Harold Pinter, CH, CBE (1930–2008), English playwright, screenwriter, actor, director, poet, author, political activist, and the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, at the time of his death considered by many "the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation."
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.
Sir Michael Victor Codron is a British theatre producer, known for his productions of the early work of Harold Pinter, Christopher Hampton, David Hare, Simon Gray and Tom Stoppard. He has been honoured with a Laurence Olivier Award for Lifetime Achievement, and is a stakeholder and director of the Aldwych Theatre in the West End, London.