RESULTS

A biography of the playwright Harold Pinter and a study of his work as writer, actor and director. His political beliefs are viewed from the perspective of his life, which he began as an only child in Hackney, where he was one of a group of youths delighting in intellectual wordplay and badinage.

Representing Pinter's own selection of his non-dramatic writings, this volume includes pieces of poetry and prose up to 1990 and ranges back to the earliest piece, 'The Kullus', which was written when he was 19 years old.

Within Pinter's Collected Poems & Prose there is a beautiful essay called 'Hutton and the Past' - a haunting meditation on a brief era of English cricket, from the 1940s through to the 1950s. An elegant hymn to the sculptural, electric and driving power of the game.

In south London, a mini-cab driver and his increasingly demented controller talk over the airwaves. The dialogue between the one in his darkened office, the other in his darkened cab, give way to escapist fantasy and the possibility of getting a cab to Victoria Station recedes.

Management Teaching use:(Victoria Station) The dialogue between the Controller and the Driver in this short play is typical of conversations which are conducted everywhere between a supervisor and the subordinate. There is denial of understanding, misunderstanding and eventually a complete lack of common ground between the two, at which point, as in this text, the original task is forgotten and both participants go off at a tangent. This is often the case in organisations where internal channels of communication are poor. Students should consider ways in which the Controller might have ensured that he was understood and how he might best have achieved his original objective.

Harold Pinter's plays are lauded the world over but, until now, little has been gathered together of his other writings. Various Voices presents a wealth of material and a multiplicity of form in which to enjoy the crystal clarity of language and style which marks out Pinter as a true original. Through Various Voices the reader can trace Pinter's development from a nascent writer exploring the boundaries of his craft to the assured maturity of his later work.