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Celebration (Pinter)

Short Play, Dramatic Comedy  /  4w, 5m

Harold Pinter

"Hugely entertaining. The riotous one liners fall far faster and funnier than ever. Pinter captures the vacuous idiocies of everyday dialogue with dazzling skill." - Mail on Sunday

Celebration (Pinter)

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  • Cast Size
    Cast Size
    4w, 5m
  • Audience
    Target Audience
    Adult, Senior

Details

Summary
In a fashionable restaurant, two gangsterish brothers, formerly from the East End but now "strategy consultants who enforce the peace", are celebrating a wedding anniversary with their wives, who are sisters. At the next table, a banker is dining with his wife, formerly his secretary. Violent, wildly funny, this play displays a vivid zest for life. Diners and the staff at an elegant restaurant treat audiences to some unusually entertaining fare in this recent London hit by one of the major voices of modern theatre.

Keywords

M5 (30s-40s)
F6 (30s-40s

  • Time Period Contemporary
  • Setting A restaurant
  • Features Contemporary Costumes/Street Clothes
  • Cautions
    • Mild Adult Themes

Media

"In Pinter's plays, words are probes launched into the world, variously, to mask, to mystify, to mock or to murder. He sets out his entire smorgasbord of gorgeous verbal moves in Celebration, which like all good festive occasions, he keeps light and lively." - The New Yorker

"Hugely entertaining. The riotous one liners fall far faster and funnier than ever. Pinter captures the vacuous idiocies of everyday dialogue with dazzling skill." - Mail on Sunday

"One of the finest comic writers in the language. [The] dialogue has a sense of ebb and flow, of bursting out and retreating in defeat, of self abasement and evasion, of attack and tactical withdrawal. The result is that the most prosaic passages can have a musical quality; harsh minor keys, perversely accurate rhythms, heady crescendos that take you headlong into pauses pregnant with knowledge." - London Sunday Times

Licensing & Materials

  • Minimum Fee: £40 per performance plus VAT when applicable.

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Scripts

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Authors

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter (1930-2008) was born in London on October 10, 1930. He lived with Antonia Fraser from 1975 until his death on Christmas Eve 2008. (They were married in 1980).

After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama, he worke ...

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