Other places: Three plays

by Harold Pinter

84p paperback, very good, clean copy, this copy published in the year 1982 in the series entitled Methuen Modern Plays

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, Fiction, Literature, 20th Century

83 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four short plays by Harold Pinter are contained in this book.
The first up was A Kind Of Alaska, it was about a forty-year-old woman who wakes up after being asleep for over twenty years. She received an injection from her doctor that brought her back. The world has changed and all that she is told by her doctor and sister shows her how much.
A very good play that I enjoyed.
The second play was Victoria Station. It had a comic feel to it. A dispatcher is trying to send one of his drivers to Victoria Station to pick up a fair. The driver is acting confused as to where it is and where he was at. It is not made clear from the play if he is ill or has lost his mind. Harold Pinter definitely knows how to write a great play.
Next up was Family Voices. It is told in letters. A son is describing the residence of the house he is living in. While his mother is begging him to write to her so she will know he is ok. You have to read on to the end to understand everything that is going on in this situation.
The last play was One For The Road.
It was a chilling look at how people are treated by a totalitarian government. The head of the interrogation taunts the husband. He then speaks to the 7-year-old son. Finally going into where the wife is being held. It is revealed that she has been raped so many times she has lost count. This play was disturbing but impossible to put down.
A wonderful collection of plays by the talented Harold Pinter.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of the three short plays in this collection, I found A Kind of Alaska the strongest. Pinter keeps the play grounded enough to tell a story and give the audience emotional stakes while still playing in his open-ended avant garde style. A good read for those already introduced to Pinter. Quasi-recommended.

[Jordan · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of the three plays in this collection was based on Oliver Sack's Awakenings, which is the reason that the plays were purchased for me. I have to say, tho it was based on Awakenings, it was very loosely so. In general I thought the plays were okay - not great, not bad. However, they are felt remarkably the same. Disjointed conversations that never really go anywhere. The dialogue was good but there was a sense of "yeah, well that's over now what's next."

I don't think I would recommend this to anyone, but I'm not mad I read it.

[Bobby Keniston · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Other Places" by Harold Pinter, a collection that consists of three short plays: "A Kind of Alaska", "Victoria Station", and "Family Voices"
Those who know me know of my deep and abiding love and appreciation of Harold Pinter's work. I remember being in high school and reading pieces like "The Dumb Waiter" and "A Slight Ache" for the first time and falling completely in love with the language. In college, I encountered works like "The Caretaker", and perhaps my personal favorite (it was Pinter's own favorite, according to an interview on Charlie Rose) "The Homecoming". I have owned this collection "Other Places" for a spell, but, for me, when I love a writer, I want to save some of their work for a later date, and that date came today (perhaps because I was talking about Pinter yesterday while discussing "All Over").
"Other Places" was first presented by the National Theatre, London, in 1982. "A Kind of Alaska" is perhaps the most enduring and received the most attention of the trio, and it is, arguably the meatiest of the three, presenting a side of Pinter that surprised some critics and audiences. Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian that, "A Kind of Alaska (which strikes me on instant acquaintance as a masterpiece) moves one in a way no work of his has ever done before." And while I am not sure I completely agree, there is no question that the piece is bold and creative with a great emotional payoff, while still posing some very interesting questions along the way. A note in the text from Pinter tells how the play was inspired by "Awakenings" by Oliver Sacks, a true story of people who, in a sense, froze in time with a sickness called encephalitis lethargica, "sleeping sickness". In the play, a middle-aged woman wakes up from this sickness, having stopped in time when she was a 16 year-old girl. Pinter's work in establishing her disorientation and confusion is masterful. With her is Hornby, who has been treating her all this time, often neglecting his own life in the process, and Pauline, Deborah's younger sister who was only 13 when Deborah fell ill and is now also a middle-aged woman. The initial production starred Judi Dench as Deborah, and one can't help but imagine how great this Dame of the theater was in the role.
"Victoria Station" is a split stage conversation between a Controller and a Taxi Driver, and is a classic (and quite amusing) example of Pinter's theme of the spaces that often effect ability to communicate. A simple, short conflict, but it made me laugh out loud more than once.
"Family Voices" was originally produced for radio on BBC 3 in 1981 before becoming a stage piece. Indeed, one can imagine it working well as a radio piece. It consists of 3 voices giving parallel monologues--- a son, mother and father--- in the form of letters. Whether these letters were ever sent is a matter we cannot be sure of. I found the piece to be filled with Pinter's usual beautiful writing, which often comes off as lyrical in its precision and honest directness. We may not always completely understand, but we know that the characters understand, which is good enough.
I could go on and on about Harold Pinter all day, as he truly is one of my heroes, but I won't do that right now. It is probably enough to know that he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, an honor he very much deserved, and gave a speech that is still worth watching (a speech he had to send by video, as he was too sick with cancer to attend in-person).

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

"A Kind of Alaska", about a woman who wakes up after decades in a coma, is clearly the star of this collection, but the other two tacked on to fill out the publication would certainly be worthy for scene work by aspiring actors. I am torn between whether I think the abrupt ending of "Alaska" is brilliant or whether it prematurely terminates what could have been a better full length play. Either way, it has been a Pinter play that has stuck in my mind since first reading it in the mid 1990s and I still had my copy of it at the bottom of an old box of plays. I was surprised to find that I had retained most of it - so it appears to be durable writing from a master of the craft.

And also worth noting that a young(ish) Judi Dench is on the cover, having been the star of the original production of A Kind of Alaska. I'm pretty sure back in 1995 I didn't know who Judi Dench was so had no recollection of that, but upon seeing the cover again I immediately exclaimed "Wow that's Judi Dench!" I'm hoping the internet will produce an old recording of the production because I'd love to see her playing this part.

[Oana-Maria Uliu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another mixed review.
A Kind of Alaska - 5 stars (one of the best plays I've ever read)
Victoria Station - 2,75 stars (not easy to understand, but at least it's short)
Family Voices - 4,25 stars (a really good play for the radio or an audiobook, but not easy to adapt for the stage)

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The compilation I read also has One for the Road.

I saw A Kind of Alaska performed years ago, and loved it; I did not get as much from reading it now, but that often happens.

[sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

stunning and ephemeral
i had no idea what was happening at any point (complimentary)

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Other Places is a triptych of three short plays by the British dramatist Harold Pinter that were first presented together in 1982. Pinter was shortly to turn in an overtly political direction, revealing the dirty tricks behind the humane rhetoric of Western democracies, suggesting we aren't as different from dictatorial tyrannies as we continually tell ourselves. However, these particular plays are more representative of his career before that turn, the “comedy of menace”.

Thus we get allusions to all kinds of foreboding but never entirely explained events in Family Voices, a dual monologue where a man and woman read letters. The son writes to his mother of the strange rooming house in which he has settled in the big city. The mother, on the other hand, sends anguished pleas to her son, asking him to come back home as she has apparently heard nothing from him since he left. Pinter's rooting in Beckett's absurdism is particularly palpable here.

A Kind of Alaska was inspired by Oliver Sacks's book Awakenings. Patients suffering from encephalitis lethargica spent decades in a catatonic state, but were eventually “awoken” with the drug L-DOPA in the 1960s, unaware that any time had passed. The play consists of three roles, Deborah, who fell catatonic in her teens and has just woke up at the age of 40-something, Hornby, the doctor who administers the treatment, and Pauline, Deborah's sister. Pinter here seems interested in the power relationships that could be suggest for such a scenario, where Deborah, who still believes herself a teenager girl, is confronted with an unknown man whose good intentions she remains unconvinced of. Hornby, for his part, may developed too much of an emotional attachment to his patient over the years.

Finally, Victoria Station is an amusing dialogue between a radio taxi dispatcher and a driver who proves difficult to wrangle. Here the "comedy of menace" consists of the dispatcher's veering between chummy talk, as he tries to get the driver to pick up the passenger assigned, and violent outbursts where he threatens the driver.

These three plays and more late Pinter are available in the Plays 4 volume of his collected works published by Faber, so there is little need to seek out Other Places, but if you come across it in a jumble sale, it will prove an enjoyable read. One thing note with Other Places is that the American paperback edition from 1984 contains a fourth play, One for the Road. This is the political Pinter, and an emotionally powerful play at that. A man and his wife are interrogated by what seems to be a party official in a repressive state. But wait, this is all in English, and the characters have English names. Could that happen over here? There's a shock ending and sudden blackout that makes this one of Pinter's most stunning works.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A kind of Alaska was inspired by Awakenings, by Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who has written about all kinds of strange neurological disorders. I would really like to see these three Pinter plays performed.

[Gregorio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting Pinter is interesting. Victoria Station may be the funniest Pinter I've ever read.

[Stewart · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this collection of one-act plays, A Kind of Alaska is the highlight -- a mesmerizing tour de force for an actress. Haunting theater.