The History of Production of the Works of Harold Pinter
The Black and White (1955)
Harold Pinter
Prose (fiction)
English
A short prose piece told from the first-person perspective of an old woman talking of her night in the Black and White café. The piece was adapted to a two-hander dramatic sketch in 1959 for performance in a revue.
Date of Composition: 1954 - 1955 Confidence Level
Linked Works
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Linked Places
The Black and White Milk Bar (Type of place: Location (within the fiction))
The Black and White is set in this Milk bar at 68 Fleet Street, no longer extant. Pinter would frequent this establishment with his friends on late nights out in London. Its location was convenient for them as Fleet Street would be where they would alight from buses from West London via Marble Arch (as the narrative voice recounts, correctly naming the 294 night bus from Marble Arch to Fleet Street) and catch buses home to Hackney.
Marble Arch (Type of place: Location (within the fiction))
In The Black and the White, the narrator says she has got the 294 all-night bus from Marble Arch to the milk bar on Fleet Street. This is the accurate route of the 294 night bus in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Publishers
Faber and Faber Ltd on (2009)
in Harold Pinter, Various Voices: Sixty years of Prose, Poetry. Politics 1948-2008. pp. 95-7.
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Resources
Sound loud: Harold Pinter in 1964 reading The Black and White (prose) (URL)
Type: Social media
External Link: https://soundcloud.com/92y/harold-pinter
A Soundcloud of Harold Pinter reading some of his prose and poetry. New York, 1964. He reads the prose short story The Black and White (prose) (1954-5) from 31:15 to 37:30.
Sources
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