SOURCE: Kellaway, Kate. “Harold's Hat Trick.” New Statesman 127, no. 4386 (22 May 1998): 50-1.

In the following review, Kellaway offers praise for Pinter's plays A Kind of Alaska, The Collection, and The Lover.

The three short plays by Harold Pinter now at the Donmar all lead to the same question: how do we know what our lives contain, and how can we trust the contents? In A Kind of Alaska, a 1982 piece inspired by Oliver Sacks' Awakenings, a woman who has been dead to the world for 29 years wakes to find herself middle aged. She still thinks like a child, recalling balloons, a favourite dog, blue lilac wallpaper, her father's diversions, her mother's kisses. But her mother is now dead, her father elsewhere, and the sister she always hated is waiting to see her.

This is Sleeping Beauty gone wrong. And instead of Prince Charming, the oppressive figure of a middle-aged...