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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Lover is a 1962 one-act play by Harold Pinter, originally written for television, but subsequently performed on stage.[1] The play contrasts bourgeois domesticity with sexual yearning.[2]
The Lover | |
---|---|
Written by | Harold Pinter |
Date premiered | 28 March 1963 |
Place premiered | ITV |
Original language | English |
Genre | One-act play |
As with the drama of Anton Chekhov, some of Pinter's plays support "serious" and "comic" interpretations; The Lover has been staged successfully both as an ironic comedy on the one hand and as a nervy drama on the other.[3][4] As is often the case with Pinter, the play probably contains both.[5]
Pinter leads the audience to believe that there are three characters in the play: the wife, the husband and the lover. But the lover who comes to call in the afternoons is revealed to be the husband adopting a role. He plays the lover for her: she plays the whore for him. As the play goes on the man (first as the lover and then as the husband) expresses a wish to stop the pretend adultery, to the dismay of the woman. Finally, the husband suddenly switches back to the role of the lover.
The play originally premiered in a 60 minute TV production directed by Joan Kemp-Welch for Associated-Rediffusion, transmitted by ITV on 28 March 1963.[6]
It opened at the Arts Theatre on 18 September 1963 in a production by the author, as part of a double bill with his play The Dwarfs; and closed on 5 October.[7]
The Financial Times wrote "The little play works simply beautifully, like a perfectly adjusted piece of miniature machinery, except that machinery is dead and this play is scintillating alive."[8]
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