Celebration & The Room

by Harold Pinter

Jack Kroll in Newsweek has called Harold Pinter "the most fascinating, enigmatic and accomplished dramatist in the English language." Since his first full-length play, The Birthday Party (1958), and continuing with The Homecoming (1965), Pinter has trained a sharp eye on the strange dynamics of modern family life. In his newest play, Celebration, he continues to examine the darker places of relationships. Celebration is an acerbic portrait of a sated culture choking on its own material success. Startling, full of black humor and wicked satire, Celebration displays a vivid zest for life. Also included in this volume is Pinter's classic play The Room. Both plays are invested with the elements that make Pinter's work unique: the disturbingly familiar dialogue, subtle characterization, and abrupt mood and power shifts among characters, which can be by turns terrifying, moving, and wildly funny.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, Literature, British Literature

176 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1957

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

[Steven Felicelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

not his best, but it's Pinter - starts out with four stars with curtain comes up

[Dolf van der Haven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nobel Prize in Literature 2005.
Harold Pinter is mostly known for a handful of early plays. In this book, his very first and very last plays are combined, just as presented in a double-bill performance at the end of his life. The contrast and commonalities are clear.
The language has changed entirely: where The Room still uses a type of stiff-upper-lip English that reminds me of some of my older colleagues, Celebration is direct and rude (reminding me of entirely different colleagues).
What remains is the human condition where everything that is outside of one's direct inner circle is a threat and therefore cannot be trusted. The fear of the other is similar to Sartre's "l'Enfer c'est les autres" and therefore still fits into tue absurdist/existentialist tradition.
Of the two plays, I liked The Room best, because it has a more restrained style. Celebration excels in the display of empty relationships, but is weaker in its use of language.

[Byran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks, didn't understand a word I read.

[Cole Wright-Schaner · Rating 5 out of 5]

genius play—best I've read all term!

[Sophie D. · Rating 3 out of 5]

J'ai eu une nette préférence pour La Chambre.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, published in 2001 around the time of the playwright's 70th birthday and a bit of a retrospective, contains two plays by Harold Pinter. "Celebration", first presented in 2000, was actually the last full-length play that Pinter wrote, as he wrote only poetry for the remainder of his life. The Room was Pinter’s first play, dating from 1957.

As a comedy about marriage and adultery, Celebration comes as a bit of a change of pace after the very intense “political” plays Pinter had focused on in the years immediately prior to it. Riotously funny, it is set in "the best restaurant in Europe" with the stage divided into two tables. At one, Lambert and his brother Matt dined with their wives, Julie and her sister Prue, celebrating the anniversary of Julie and Lambert. At the second table, Suki chats with his wife Russell. As the play progresses, the characters get progressively more drunk, make appalling revelations without realizing it, divulge their infidelities, and yet stay oddly content and glad-hearted. Among the tables roam Richard and Sonia, the owners, and a hilarious intrusive waiter. It has been a long time since I read a Pinter play that made me laugh out loud (unless it was the laugh of shock and outrage at revelations in his political works), and enjoyed "Celebration" immensely.

The Room was written when Pinter was still squarely in the genre of theatre of the absurd. Rose, a sixty-something housewife, muses about who's living in the basement flat of her building, talks incessantly to her taciturn husband, and encounters a young couple interested in the room to let. At the end of the play Riley, a "blind negro" enters and brings a surprising message to Rose, resulting in the play's shocking ending. While I found the ending compelling, most of the play is fairly tedious; the very length of the play is a mark of the young writer's immaturity, since mature Pinter is quite compressed. Still, worth checking out as the beginning of a very entertaining career.

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Celebration is faced paced and easy to read, a microcosm of life's many meaningless moments that I took to represent our desire for materiality over meaning and the elusiveness of time. The Room is a haunting tale that I took to be a reflection of our desire to disassociate from the past and our constant challenge to find permanence and meaning. Both tales leave you a little dissatisfied at the end, but provide plenty of material and questions to mull over afterwards.

[Bogdan Liviu · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Da, pe vremuri visam să ajung poet, dar nu m-a-ncurajat taică-meu, gândea despre mine că sunt un rahat."

"Aveţi ceva-mpotrivă dacă interjectez?"

[Gabrielle Spattz · Rating 5 out of 5]

La chambre est fascinante jusqu'à la dernière réplique. Le mystère d'une maison où les silences sont la clé de tout le plaisir qui se dégage de la lecture...

[Kevin Stephany · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's Pinter. Enough said.