The book traces the development of Pinter's female characters both as dramatis personae and as theatrical functionaries. It explores a new exciting aspect of Pinter's work in the domain of character portrayal, and it supplies a kaleidoscopic view of Pinter criticism to date at home and abroad.

Updated edition of this popular Companion examining the wide range of Pinter's work, and his continuing impact and influence.

Examines the basis of Harold Pinter's tense comedy and how it functions in his plays as well as covering the major drama from The Room to Other Places. Diamond argues that the metaphysical fear and emptiness so characteristic of the Pinter situation are inseparable from his use and abuse of literary and popular comic traditions.

Approaches the problems of obscurities, ambiguities, and interrelationships in Pinter's plays through the mechanisms of the dream and shows that the plays group around the oedipal wish.

The book reconnoiters the New World Order of Postmodernism in five plays The Room (1957), The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1965) and Celebration (2000) of Harold Pinter. With culturally structured, incomprehensibly manipulated, dual and fragmented characters, Harold Pinter analyses the ambiguities of political system. It is perhaps the System that forcibly drags Stanley to a world of systems in The Birthday Party. The situation of Ruth in The Homecoming clearly indicates the inevitable grip of this System. The last play Celebration overtly ridicules the very political system we approve of wherein the strategy consultants and the corporate people define the organized mechanism of this SYSTEM! The internalization of power which the power structures of societies and politics possess, appears largely in his plays, providing postmodernism its duality. Pinter offers us a true picture of our postmodernist culture an apocalyptic world at the edge of civilization.

Nicholas Grene explores the subject of domestic spaces in modern drama through close readings of nine major plays.