Volume 25, Number 21 & 22 · January 25, 1979
Pinter Land
By Russell Davies
Poems and Prose 1949-1977
by Harold Pinter
Grove Press, 102 pp., $5.95 (paper)
Complete Works: Volumes One, Two, and Three
by Harold Pinter
Grove Press, 256, 249, 247 pp., $3.95 each (paper)
Betrayal
by Harold Pinter, directed by Peter Hall
at the Lyttelton Theatre (London)
Harold Pinter started off unluckily. He arrived on the London stage at a time when it was no longer fashionable for playwrights merely to exercise their gifts. They had to apply them, more or less explicitly, to social themes. Among various old theatrical peacocks cawing vainly in protest at the trend, Noel Coward was prominent, and in 1961 he had a celebrated quarrel with Kenneth Tynan over the state of the theater. The most interesting test case was Pinter himself. Coward was a supporter, chiefly on the rather defensive grounds that Pinter was 'neither pretentious, pseudointellectual nor self-consciously propagandist.' Producing his favorite word from behind his back with a peacocklike flourish, the Master declared:
Review, 3536 words
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