PINTER, Harold [Alan Schneider].
Tea Party and Other Plays.
London: Methuen & Co Ltd , 1967.
$2,250.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152191
+$500
First Edition of Pinter's Tea Party and Other Plays; Inscribed by Him to His American Director Alan Schneider
First edition of Pinter's collection of three plays originally written for television. Duodecimo, original cloth. A remarkable association copy, inscribed by the author in the year of publication on the title page, "May 67 To Alan With love Harold." Additionally signed by its recipient, director Alan Schneider, on the front free endpaper. Alan Schneider (1917-1984), the Russian-born American director, served as Pinter's principal interpreter on the American stage, directing the American premieres of The Birthday Party, The Collection and The Dumb Waiter (winning an Obie Award for the latter) and, at the time of his death in 1984, directing Pinter's Other Places for the Manhattan Theatre Club. He was equally celebrated as Samuel Beckett's trusted American director and as the director of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which he won the 1963 Tony Award. The warmth of the present inscription, made in May 1967 as the two men's collaboration was flourishing, attests to the close friendship between playwright and director; though the American stage premiere of Tea Party and The Basement (New York, 1968) fell to another director, Schneider remained Pinter's foremost champion before American audiences. Very good in a very good dust jacket. An exceptional association copy, uniting one of the great postwar dramatists with the man who brought his work to the American stage.
Tea Party and Other Plays (1967) gathers three works by Harold Pinter (1930-2008) that were each originally written for television, representing a significant and somewhat undervalued strand of his output in the mid-1960s during the productive period between the celebrated stage successes of The Caretaker (1960) and The Homecoming (1965). The volume includes Tea Party, The Basement, and Night School, three short plays that share an abiding preoccupation with what one critic has aptly described as invasion and loss of masculine status, the characteristic Pinteresque anxiety in which a man's control over his domestic or professional space is gradually and inexplicably eroded by forces he cannot name or resist. Tea Party, adapted by Pinter from his own 1964 short story of the same title, was first transmitted on BBC Television in March 1965 starring Leo McKern and Pinter's first wife Vivien Merchant as Wendy, with its first stage production following in October 1968 as part of a double bill with The Basement. The title play focuses on a successful businessman whose grasp on reality and sexual self-possession progressively disintegrates during the course of the professional and domestic encounters that constitute the narrative, deploying the television medium's capacity for subjective point-of-view cinematography to render the protagonist's deteriorating perception in visual terms that the stage could only approximate.
Tea Party and Other Plays.
$2,250.00
In Stock
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