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The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter
Directed by Lisa Thomas
Performances: Tuesday 7th to Saturday 11th July 2009, Bell Theatre
In 1954 Harold Pinter, then a jobbing actor, was in rep in Eastbourne. He got talking in a pub to a retired concert pianist who took him back to his lodgings and let him share his attic room. Pinter noted that the man kept being tickled and goosed by his landlady and wrote to a friend: “I have filthy insane digs, a great bulging scrag of a woman with breasts rolling at her belly, an obscene household, cats, dogs, tea-strainers, mess, scratch, dung, poison, infantility”.
Three years later, out of this bizarre set-up, Pinter conjured the core of The Birthday Party, his second play: Stanley, a man staying in a terrible boarding house in on the south coast, and Meg, his skittish, elderly landlady. But in the play, Stanley is tracked down by a pair of sinister men whom he may or may not know and taken off by them to an unknown place. Growing up Jewish in the Second World War, Pinter always had a feeling that the Gestapo might be just round the corner – and the duo undoubtedly embody some of that wartime paranoia.
The appalling reviews for the original London production led to the play being pulled after a week and very nearly ended its playwright's career, but luckily it was seen by the influential Sunday Times critic, Harold Hobson. He wrote:
“I am willing to risk whatever reputation I have as a judge of plays by saying that The Birthday Party is not a Fourth, not even a Second, but a First; and that Pinter, on the evidence of his work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London… Mr Pinter and The Birthday Party, despite their experiences last week, will be heard of again. Make a note of their names … The fact that no one can say precisely what it is about, or give the address from which the intruding Goldberg and McCann come, or say precisely why it is that Stanley is so frightened of them, is, of course, one of its greatest merits. It is exactly in this vagueness that its spine-chilling quality lies.
Modern audiences may still be baffled by Pinter’s ‘meaning’ and the strangeness of the set-up. But both are part of the fascination of this piece which also bewitches with its brilliant characterisation and wonderful love of and use of language.
Cast
Meg Boles – Carole Coyne
Petey Boles – John Lyne
Stanley Webber – Simon Holland
Lulu – Louisa Evans
McCann – Ian O'Brien
Goldberg – David Love
For more details, please contact Lisa Thomas, Director
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