Tea Party and Other Plays.

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.