A Slight Ache and Other Plays.

A Slight Ache and Other Plays (1961) is an essential early collection by Harold Pinter (1930-2008), the Nobel Prize-winning British playwright whose innovations in dramatic form and language transformed the landscape of twentieth-century theatre, gathering nine works that illuminate the full range of his early theatrical imagination across three distinct registers. The volume contains the title play A Slight Ache, A Night Out, The Dwarfs, and five revue sketches: "Trouble in the Works," "The Black and White," "Request Stop," "Last to Go," and "Applicant," representing the breadth of Pinter's output from the late 1950s across radio, television, stage, and the shorter revue form. A Slight Ache, written in 1958, concerns a married couple's dreams and desires, focusing primarily on the husband Edward's fears of the unknown, of growing old, and of the threatening presence of the "Other" embodied in the mute and enigmatic figure of a matchseller who stands outside their gate, and it exemplifies what Pinter himself described as the essential dramatic situation: two people in a room, one wanting something and the other either giving it or withholding it. The play was first performed as a BBC radio broadcast on July 29, 1959, starring Maurice Denham and Vivien Merchant, Pinter's wife, before its stage premiere on January 18, 1961, at the Arts Theatre in London starring Emlyn Williams, Alison Leggat, and Richard Briers.