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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Celebration & by Celebration & The Room by Harold Pinter. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 659594ba6a130d4e • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. A Pinter play that merits celebration. The sound of ruffled feathers in reaction to your top 50 list of plays of the 21st century (G2, 18 September) is almost deafening. The absence of David Hare or Howard Brenton may have caused a stir, but is there no room for Harold Pinter? Surely his final play, Celebration, premiered in 2000, merits a top 50 place if not a top 20. I’m biased because I was in it, but didn’t its visceral dissection of the naked greed of late- Thatcher/Blairism presage the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the cataclysm that followed? Andy de la Tour . In the mid-1950s, my engineering student boyfriend always signed off with the symbols for the Greek letter lambda (lower case) raised to the power of infinity: love always (Letters, 20 September). We continued this throughout our married life and it is now inscribed on his tombstone: his name, the symbols below, with space for my name below again when the time comes. The undertaker was rather bemused and I sometimes wonder what strollers through the churchyard make of this. Valerie Lewis Wantage, Oxfordshire. You say a diver served in the Royal Navy as “a warfare specialist” (Wreck of battleship and Lundy cliff steps given protection, 20 September). I thought that all members of the Royal Navy were warfare specialists? Peter Hepworth Leigh on Sea, Essex. Anne Cowper (Letters, 20 September) thinks readers in Wales, Scotland and Ireland will be surprised that there is only one home side in the Rugby World Cup. I hope not; the home side Ben Ryan was referring to is Japan. Dominic Meredith Bristol. Is the current supreme court battle Pannick v Johnson the Incredible Silk v the Incredible Sulk? Well at least one of them is not credible. Ben Ashford Shrewsbury, Shropshire. Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters. Do you have a photo you’d like to share with Guardian readers? Click here to upload it and we’ll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition. The Room: Harold Pinter's 80th birthday celebrated. Pinter's first ever play is revived for one reading only. On 10 October, 2010 Harold Pinter would have turned 80. To celebrate, a group of actors gathered in a room to read The Room , his first play, to an invited audience. Among those present was his widow Antonia Fraser. On 10 October, 2010 Harold Pinter would have turned 80. To celebrate, a group of actors gathered in a room to read The Room , his first play, to an invited audience. Among those present was his widow Antonia Fraser. The play was introduced by Matthew Lloyd, artistic director of the Actors Centre and its in-house performance space, the Tristan Bates Theatre. Given that The Room was written when Pinter was still making his living as an actor it felt appropriate, he explained, that the celebration was being hosted by a venue where actors are able to hone their craft. The famous Pinteresque menace was born in this Room. The rehearsed reading was directed by Harry Burton, who told the story of The Room ’s inspiration: Pinter had once seen Quentin Crisp cooking breakfast for a burly navvy; Crisp gabbled without cease, while the man who had presumably been roughing him up in bed all sat in passive- aggressive . The image set off something in Pinter's imagination. The play was commissioned, more or less, by Henry Woolf, who was a postgraduate at Bristol when the new drama department was looking for one-act plays. Woolf and Pinter had met at Hackney Downs Grammar School, and bonded over left-wing post-war idealism, intellectual self- improvement and cricket. It was somehow fitting that their love of sport hovered in the atmosphere of the play’s first performance in a converted squash court at Bristol University in May 1957. At the time Pinter was a freshly married actor, toiling pennilessly on the repertory circuit in Torquay. He had mentioned his idea for a play. “I told a fib,” Woolf once told me, “that I knew a brilliant play, because it wasn’t written yet. The clincher was I said it wouldn’t cost them anything. I said to Harold, ‘Write it. I’ve managed to con them.’ Harold wrote back saying, ‘I can’t write a play in under six months.’ He actually wrote it in two days.” Pinter subsequently sent Woolf every fresh manuscript. The production went ahead, directed by Woolf, who also acted in it as Mr Kidd, the elderly landlord of a house full of grim 1950s bedsits. Pinter later recalled that at Bristol his friend “wasn’t bad”. In the first professional production, directed by the author at Hampstead in 1960, Pinter’s judgement of his friend’s performance was wonderfully gnomic: “He was a bit in and out,” he told me. When The Room was revived in 2000 at the Almeida as a companion piece to Celebration , which turned out to be Pinter’s final play, Woolf was finally of the right age to play Mr Kidd. Last night’s rehearsed reading featured Sian Thomas in what is in effect the Quentin Crisp role: a gabbling housewife feeding a grimly silent husband, her horizons are measured out by the four walls of a bedsit periodically visited by random figures from the chilly outdoors who all pose, in their different way, a sense of incipient threat. The famous Pinteresque menace was born in this Room . The audience had to imagine the room. They didn't have to imagine the menace. Watch a US TV version of The Room starring Linda Hunt, Donald Pleasance, Julian Sands and Annie Lennox. Harry Burton is currently researching and editing an edition of Pinter’s letters for Faber & Faber. The playwright was a reasonably prolific letter- writer, so on the off-chance that you happen to have any correspondence stashed away in a bottom drawer, Burton would like to hear from you. The Tristan Bates Theatre is soon playing host to a play which would no doubt intrigue Pinter, who was a great student and admirer of Beckett. Krapp, 39 , a one-man play by Michael Laurence, arrives from New York where it won the outstanding solo show award at the International Fringe Festival. It riffs on Krapp’s Last Tape through audio tapes, old video and other archival material. The twist is that it scrutinises not the end of life but the end of youth. It opens on 24 November. Celebration & The Room. Available. Expected delivery to the Russian Federation in 9-21 business days. Description. A restaurant. Two curved banquettes. It's a celebration. Violent, wildly funny, Harold Pinter's new play displays a vivid zest for life. In The Room, Harold Pinter's first play, he reveals himself as already in full control of his unique ability to make dramatic poetry of the banalities of everyday speech and the precision with which it defines character. Harold Pinter's latest play, Celebration, and his first play, The Room directed by the author himself, premiered as a double-bill at London's Almeida Theatre in March 2000. show more. Celebration & The Room by Harold Pinter. ''Celebration', a one-act play, focuses on two groups of diners at an expensive and trendy restaurant following a night at the theatre. At one table, an anniversary celebration is taking place. The men, who are brothers are also married to sisters, and have shadowy backgrounds, calling themselves 'strategy consultants.' At another table are a banker and his ditzy trophy wife. Floating between these tables are the restaurant's hosts and a chatty waiter who name drops continually. As the New York Times reviewer stated: "Nothing really happens in 'Celebration,' even by Pinter standards. It's basically all talk, exchanges of insults, skewed platitudes and highly suspect memories described with placid certainty. The subjects, on some level, are almost invariably sex and power. And yet it all packs the tickling wallop of perfectly orchestrated slapstick." 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. James Bolam . . . . . Matt . . . . . Suki . . . . . Russell James Fox . . . . . Richard . . . . . Lambert Julie McKenzie . . . . . Prue Sophie Okonedo . . . . . Sonia . . . . . Waiter . . . . . Julie. Harold Pinter is currently everywhere. His final play, Celebration, went out this week on More4 along with a lively 75-minute documentary. But why now? How does one account for what Noel Coward, witnessing a spate of late revivals of his own work, called "Dad's Renaissance"? In Pinter's case, it may stem partly from a sense of collective guilt. In October 2005, Pinter's 75th birthday was marked by the London theatre, aside from a fringe production of , with a resounding silence: you had to go to to find Michael Colgan at the Gate Theatre staging an Irish hooley for the Hackney hero involving plays, productions and an array of star guests. The fact that Pinter, later that same week, was awarded the Nobel prize for literature only made the British theatre's indifference to his work all the more astonishing. Amends are now being made, as if we have belatedly woken up to Pinter's international stature. But I suspect there is more to it than that. One sign of any genuine creative artist is that he or she is always ahead of the game: they see or hear something that the rest of us don't. Both artistically and politically, Pinter has persistently been ahead of the pack; and now the public and critics are at last catching up with him. Look back over the history of Pinter's plays and you find that, with the exception of , they have all been misunderstood first time round. The Birthday Party in 1958 was famously dismissed as gibberish or a derivative piece of Ionesco absurdism. I was amongst those, as colleagues never cease to remind me, who in 1978 booted into touch for "its obsession with the tiny ripples on the stagnant pond of bourgeois-affluent life". And in 1996 the masterly was attacked for its introduction of images of European suffering into a rural English setting. No one ever "gets" a Pinter play on a single viewing or reading. It’s 50 years since Harold Pinter’s first play, The Room, was performed. This week, in tribute to his towering influence on British theatre, his most recent play, Celebration, written in 1999, will be aired on More4. Set in a ritzy London restaurant, Celebration is a biting, black comedy about two thuggish businessmen and their wives on , and boasts an extraordinary stellar cast, many of them drawn from Pinter’s regular “stable” of actors. As the curtain rises on this landmark piece of televised theatre, RT asks three of the production’s distinguished cast what makes our most celebrated—and possibly least understood—living playwright so special. People tend to think of him as a bit heavy, but the thing about his play is that it’s extremely funny. My character’s just a s**tbag, really, and, as such, deeply enjoyable to play. It’s demanding work for an actor, though, because you can’t say one syllable wrong. Some plays don’t transfer to screen, but I think this one does. It’s unusually powerful stuff, and the way television’s going at the minute, thank God for it!” In this play, he takes something really quite commonplace—people in an urban environment going out to enjoy themselves in a restaurant—and takes it to another level. Restaurants are a place for public behavior—we really don’t know too much more about these characters when they leave the table than when they sit down. It’s up to the audience to imagine, from the dialogue, what’s going on in the rest of their lives. And that’s Pinter’s great truth. You want to know how other people live—you read novels, you read magazines—but in the end, other people remain a mystery.” Janie Dee, who plays Suki in Celebration, first met Harold Pinter when he contributed three of his poems to a concern for peace in Iraq that she produced. “We’re good mates,” says Dee. “He’s so articulate and precise, yet he talks strangely from the heart. In lots of his plays you see him holding us and our behaviour up to ourselves very clearly. I think Harold almost hand-picked us for this production, because he knows that we’ll interpret his stuff in a way that makes him happy. Above all, you have to be very honest as an actor to do Pinter.” Michael Gambon, Colin Firth, Jim Broadbent, James Bolam, Stephen Rea, Sophie Okonedo and Penelope Wilton will act in a television version of Harold Pinter’s play Celebration for TV channel More4. will direct the film to be broadcast in December, for producers Alan Maloney and Michael Colgan. "Celebration" was first performed in 2000 at the Almeida theatre in North London, with another play entitled "The Room" that Harold Pinter wrote in 1957. It was considered a highly unique experience to see Pinter's first play and his newest, works separated by more than 40 years, staged together. However, the two one-act plays are published together now as well. From reviews for the Almeida production in 2000: The funniest, feistiest piece Pinter has written in years. What Pinter reveals, with a good deal of satirical verve, is the coarse swagger and loutish insensitivity of these walking wallets and their spouses. But Pinter's plow is much more than an obvious attack on the nerdy nouveau riche. here the diners use the restaurant as a retreat from the outside world. And, as always in Pinter, there is no such thing as a harmless sanctuary: here the threat to an evening of crude conviviality comes from an intrusive waiter. Behind the play's wild comedy lurks something strange and incalculable which is beautifully caught in Pinter's fast-moving production. (Michael Billington for ) Celebration is certainly his funniest and also perhaps his most accessible script in many years. It is set in an amazingly familiar West End restaurant, where he has even managed to cast a lookalike for the tall, urbane real-life manager; at two separate tables. sit a cross-section of recognisable Pinter types. At the smaller table are a couple. taunting each other with past and present infidelities; at the larger, two Mafioso thugs and their blowsy, aging trophy-wives are celebrating a wedding anniversary. But, as usual with Pinter, there is a good deal going on just under the tablecloths; neither group is really in any mood for celebration, and as the wine loosens their tongues some extremely unpleasant truths start to crawl out from the past. Meanwhile, the unctuous manager, his female assistant and a young waiter with extraordinary false-memory fantasies start to assert themselves as something more than restaurant staff, and at the end of the evening it is the young waiter. left alone on stage to confront his own demons, who has not only the last words but also the most immediate claim to our ultimate attention. both these plays are about some of the same things—sexual jealousy, nameless tenors, violent men and women who have only their sex to define them. But where The Room is frequently vicious, Celebration is something still more dangerous; the only visible knives here may be the ones on the elegantly laid tables, but people are also getting laid and knifed, only this time with a smile. It is the smile of the killer monsters and mobsters, but the shark still has shiny teeth, dear, and Pinter shows them pearly white. (Sheridan Morley for the Spectator) As the Telegraph advertised, “for three nights only this week, there is the chance to see history being repeated.” All the action takes place in a swish London restaurant where two coarse-grained strategy consultants are dining with their respective wives. At an adjacent table a banker and his wife banter over his recently discovered affair. But while Pinter gets a lot of laughs out of these gold-plated philistines, he also suggests they are displaced people. Shorn of any inherited values, they live in an eternal present of sex, food and conspicuous consumption. But what lifts this 50-minute piece into another realm is the intrusive presence of a Waiter played with looming intensity by Stephen Rea. If the diners have no cultural roots, he seems afflicted by an excess of them as he reminisces about a grandad who apparently knew everyone from WB Yeats to the Beverley Sisters. But for all his buttonholing eccentricity, the Waiter has access to a world of family and feeling denied to the grandstanding diners. Dangerous, however, to get too solemn about a piece that reminds us Pinter has always been a comic writer. And Alan Stanford's neatly organised production rides along on a wave of laughter. Michael Gambon is outrageous as a bullish peace enforcer who can scarcely say a civil word to Penelope Wilton as his sardonically subversive wife. Janie Dee also raises the temperature several notches as she taunts ' faithless husband with memories of her own "saucy, flirty, giggly" younger self. And Charles Dance and Joanna Lumley preside over the clientele as if they were running an upmarket therapy centre. Two more chances only to catch a play that reminds us that Pinter has always been one of the great piss-takers. Staged readings tend not to make huge inroads at the box office. But then they tend not to boast a cast as mouthwatering as the veritable thespocracy which will muster, scripts in hand, on Thursday. It consists of six Pinter veterans in Michael Gambon, Penelope Wilton, Jeremy Irons, Stephen Rea, Janie Dee and Kenneth Cranham, and three Pinter virgins in Sinéad Cusack, Charles Dance and Joanna Lumley. Most of the above gathered in Dublin last month for a weekend's reading of plays, prose and poetry organised by the Gate Theatre. Even one of their own number was agog at the array of talent around him. "When I saw them on the stage," says Stephen Rea, who was in the original cast of Ashes to Ashes, "I said, 'Even Mourinho couldn't buy this lot.'" [. ] Celebration had its first performances at the Almeida in 2000, in a double bill with Pinter's first play, The Room, written 43 years earlier. Set in a swanky London restaurant, it features two tables. At one table are two rather spivvy brothers (played, in the staged reading, by Gambon and Cranham), and their wives (Wilton and Cusack), who are sisters. At the other table someone big in the City is wining and dining his dolly bird (Irons and Dee). Interruptions come from a lugubrious maître d' (Dance), a waitress (Lumley) and a waiter brimming with preposterous anecdotes about the famous people his grandfather knew (Rea). I have an uncomfortable memory of this paper's theatre critic, Charles Spencer, deriding the gales of laughter with which Celebration was greeted on its première as "sycophantic" - uncomfortable because I was sitting next to him, and laughing. Pinter's later work had become increasingly gnomic and politicised, and here in his 70th year he suddenly came up with what appeared to be an out-and-out comedy, boisterous, even crude in places, with only a light dusting of his trademark menace (the brothers are "security consultants"). "Harold is a very funny writer and people are a bit holier than thou about him," says Penelope Wilton, the star of , Betrayal and . In this play, she says, "he has a way with language where he is able to make swear words have their value back, and don't tell me how he does it but it is very funny." There was more laughter at the reading in Dublin, some of it from the stage. "When you do a reading and haven't done much rehearsal," explains Rea, "a lot of it feels new to you and you're not protected. You were very open to the play but also it made you corpse." "I couldn't stop," admits Gambon, who has been in Betrayal, The Caretaker and . "I had to hold on tight. Several of us were on the edge of going. It's not like the other ones I've been in. All his plays have a surface of a thousandth of an inch and a subtext of two miles. That's why actors love them. I think he just sat down and wrote a simple play." When Pinter wrote Betrayal, a portrait of his long affair with Joan Bakewell, Gambon found himself more or less playing the playwright himself in the original stage production. Getting the nod for the role must count as the ultimate compliment from Pinter. Jeremy Irons, who has previously been in The Caretaker on stage and The French Lieutenant's Woman (scripted by Pinter) on screen, has a theory about why he was cast in the film of Betrayal. "Harold always said he liked the fact that I didn't care about making the characters likeable." However seasoned this company, the reverence they feel for the playwright is palpable. "A request to appear in something of Harold's is really a summons from a very great height," says Rea, "and I know all actors feel that." But why? The consensus seems to be that he started his career as an actor, has ended it as a poet, and that the genius of the playwright lies somewhere in the overlap. "It's all about language," says Wilton. "In the theatre you live and die by the word and Harold just writes superbly." "He's not like any other playwright. There's no looseness in his plays," says Gambon. "Every full stop and comma counts." Irons discovered this, almost literally to his cost, when he had finished a take in the opening pub scene of Betrayal. "He said, 'You said "but" instead of an "and".' We put money on it and fortunately I was right." Despite the corpsing, the evidence from the Gate Theatre is promising. "All the actors were very very nervous," says Rea, "but the atmosphere had an incredible electricity and energy. Everyone was on some kind of high doing it. At the end Harold walked on and shook hands with each of us. It was wonderful. Everybody felt a sense of history in doing it." For three nights only this week, there is the chance to see history being repeated.

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