English Social Justice Activists - Harold Pinter, Steve Chalke, Tom Hurndall, John Nichols Thom, Simon Topping, Maria Rye (Paperback)

Chapters: Harold Pinter, Steve Chalke, Tom Hurndall, John Nichols Thom, Simon Topping, Maria Rye. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 75. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Harold Pinter, CH, CBE (10 October 1930 24 December 2008), was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor, theatre director, political activist and poet. He was among the most influential British playwrights of modern times. In 2005, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pinter's writing career spanned over 50 years and produced 29 original stage plays, 27 screenplays, many dramatic sketches, radio and TV plays, poetry, one novel, short fiction, essays, speeches, and letters. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted to film. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He directed almost 50 stage, television, and film productions and acted extensively in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works. Pinter's dramas often involve strong conflicts between ambivalent characters who struggle for verbal and territorial dominance and for their own versions of the past. Stylistically, these works are marked by theatrical pauses and silences, comedic timing, irony, and menace. Thematically ambiguous, they raise complex issues of individual identity oppressed by social forces, language, and vicissitudes of memory. In 1981, Pinter stated that he was not inclined to write plays explicitly about political subjects; yet in the mid-1980s he began writing overtly political plays. This "new direction" in his work and his left-wing political activism stimulated additio...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=8953