This first volume gathers the plays in which Harold Pinter invented his own climate.

The Birthday Party, The Room and The Dumb Waiter remain the clearest early examples of what became known, rather too neatly, as the “comedy of menace”—situations where jokes, evasions and banalities do not relieve tension but manufacture it. Pinter’s characters rarely say what they mean, though that does not make the language vague. Quite the opposite: repetition, pauses, corrections and sudden shifts in tone become instruments of control.

In The Birthday Party, an apparently harmless boarding house is invaded by two interrogators whose authority requires no explanation. The Dumb Waiter turns two hired killers waiting in a basement into a study of obedience, hierarchy and panic. The Hothouse relocates the same machinery into an institution where administration itself has become deranged. Also included are A Slight Ache, A Night Out, the short pieces The Black and White and The Examination, and Pinter’s essay “Writing for the Theatre.” 

Methuen paperback, 1986 revised edition including The Hothouse. Noticeable edge wear, creasing and rubbing to covers; pages age-toned, binding sound.