The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter.
PINTER, Harold. [Alan Schneider].
The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter.
Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter; Alan Schneider’s Annotated Director’s Copy for the American Premiere of The Dumb Waiter
New York: Grove Press, 1961.
$400.00
In Stock
Item Number: 152208
First edition, early printing of the first American edition of Pinter’s paired plays. Octavo, original pictorial wrappers, an Evergreen Original. Alan Schneider’s working copy, annotated in his hand: the half-title is marked “Director’s Copy,” with his name, telephone exchanges, and Hastings-on-Hudson return address, “Please Return to: Alan Schneider,” and a penned directory of his production team, among them the designer William Ritman. Schneider directed the American premiere of The Dumb Waiter, on a double bill with The Collection, at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 1962, in settings by Ritman. Schneider was among the foremost American directors of his generation and the great champion of the postwar stage in the United States: he directed the American premiere of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1956 and remained Beckett’s preferred American director, staged the United States premieres of Pinter’s plays from the 1962 off-Broadway double bill of The Dumb Waiter and The Collection through the Broadway premiere of The Birthday Party in 1967, and won the 1963 Tony Award for Best Direction for the original production of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In good condition. The director’s own working copy.
The Caretaker, which premiered in London in 1960 with Donald Pleasence and Alan Bates, was Harold Pinter’s first major commercial success and established him among the leading dramatists of his generation. The Dumb Waiter, his taut two-hander of hired killers awaiting instructions in a basement, premiered in Frankfurt in 1959 and reached the American stage in 1962 at the Cherry Lane Theatre under the direction of Alan Schneider. Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, the Swedish Academy observing that he “uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.”
