The Birthday Party: Pinter’s party’s so grim

The Birthday Party 

Harold Pinter Theatre, London                                                      Until Apr 14

2hrs 10mins 

Rating:

 When the young Harold Pinter went to see his play without a ticket, an usherette stopped him. ‘But I’m the author,’ he protested. The woman, who knew a dying show when she saw it, replied: ‘Oh, you poor chap.’

The house is presided over by a dim landlady called Meg, played nicely here by Zoë Wanamaker (above with Toby Jones), her hair crimped and her tea like gravy 

The house is presided over by a dim landlady called Meg, played nicely here by Zoë Wanamaker (above with Toby Jones), her hair crimped and her tea like gravy 

Sixty years ago this play was a resounding flop that lasted just one week in London. Now it’s regarded as a post-war classic, staged here in the theatre that’s been renamed after the grumpy writer whose strange, pause-laden plays don’t have the courtesy to tell us what’s going on.

We are definitely somewhere by the sea. Probably the sort of run-down resort, as Keith Waterhouse once said of Brighton, that looks as if it’s helping the police with their inquiries. The brown doors and bulging wallpaper resemble the gruesome digs that Pinter stayed in when he was a young actor in rep. He often played heavies in tatty old thrillers of the sort that this drama deliberately echoes.

Mr Goldberg is played with an insincere smile by Stephen Mangan

Mr Goldberg is played with an insincere smile by Stephen Mangan

The house is presided over by a dim landlady called Meg, played nicely here by Zoë Wanamaker, her hair crimped and her tea like gravy. Meg’s idea of a slap-up breakfast is corn flakes and sour milk followed by a cremated slice of fried bread.

Her husband is the benign Petey (the excellent Peter Wight), who stacks deckchairs on the seafront. Meg fusses over the resident Stanley, a seedy former piano player who could do with a wash. He’s played with squinting suspicion by Toby Jones in a pair of revoltingly stained trousers.

In due course, two sinister gents in smart suits turn up, their mission to terrify Stanley and take him away in their car. But first they organise a deeply sinister birthday party for Stanley, whose possible betrayal of these gangsters – or their syndicate – is left unexplained. One, the Jewish Mr Goldberg, is played with an insincere smile by Stephen Mangan and is all charm – until he turns sadistic. Tom Vaughan-Lawlor is his biddable Irish sidekick McCann, also very nasty.

Pinter invests this B-movie plot with lots of bullying coercion beneath the non-sequiturs and the aggressive exchanges. A game of blind man’s buff is memorably horrid; the party, no celebration, is clearly a prelude to a very sticky end for Stanley.

The writing is like a sinister musical score and the play’s airless intensity makes you want to take a stroll on the seafront, here vividly evoked by the sound of gulls and breaking waves.

IT’S A FACT  

In the Fifties, Harold Pinter was an actor with the stage name David Baron who also worked as a waiter, postman, bouncer and snow-clearer. 

Director Ian Rickson and his starry cast stage it all with great care – and it gets laughs where it should. I loved the way Meg looks revolted by the use of ‘succulent’, as if it’s a dirty word. But I can’t be alone in sitting through this cruel, rather godforsaken play with respect but precious little affection.

 

Teddy 

Watermill Theatre, Bangor, Berkshire 

Until Feb 10 (then touring until May 6)                                     2hrs 15mins

Rating:

This new rock ’n’ roll musical is set among the bomb sites of south London. It’s 1956 and young Teddy – with frock coat and greased hair – meets ice-cool blonde Josie.

Both are broke and need a few bob to see Johnny Valentine, ‘the Casanova of Cool’ (Dylan Wood, left), on tour in the UK. His four-piece band blasts out Dougal Irvine’s sound-a-like hits – eg Shake, Rattle And Rail – in the manner of Bill Haley, Elvis and Gene Vincent, the sort of music that drove teenagers like John Lennon wild.

This new rock ’n’ roll musical is set among the bomb sites of south London. It’s 1956 and young Teddy – with frock coat and greased hair – meets ice-cool blonde Josie

This new rock ’n’ roll musical is set among the bomb sites of south London. It’s 1956 and young Teddy – with frock coat and greased hair – meets ice-cool blonde Josie

George Parker and Molly Chesworth, as the two delinquents on the tiles, move like panthers to the music. Like the band, they’re on stage all the time.

Tristan Bernays’s clever rhyming script features lots of swearing and grievous bodily harm in an evening ponging of nightclub sweat and spilt beer. But it’s all atmosphere.

Snappy though Eleanor Rhode’s production is, there’s nothing much to this story of two youths who start out, and remain, utterly opaque. Good moves and a cracking live band help cover up the cracks.

 snapdragonproductions.com

Rita, Sue and Bob Too

Royal Court, London                                             Until Sat (touring till Feb 17) 

1hr 20mins  

Rating:

This play was written in 1982 by Andrea Dunbar when she was 19 and living on a sink estate in Bradford. Pregnant at the age of 15, the author had three babies by different fathers and died from her rough life at 29.

This play was written in 1982 by Andrea Dunbar when she was 19 and living on a sink estate in Bradford. Pregnant at the age of 15, the author had three babies

This play was written in 1982 by Andrea Dunbar when she was 19 and living on a sink estate in Bradford. Pregnant at the age of 15, the author had three babies

Her unvarnished, northern, working-class voice was one of the great theatrical finds of the Eighties. Even so, the Royal Court recently considered withdrawing this revival – a co-production with the Out Of Joint theatre company and the Octagon Theatre Bolton – after its director, Max Stafford-Clark, was accused of sexual misconduct. It was Stafford-Clark who had originally brought the play – which features scenes of two underage girls having sex with a 27-year-old man in his car – to the Royal Court.

IT’S A FACT 

Andrea Dunbar disowned the 1987 film, starring three future Emmerdale actors. She later died in the very pub used in the movie, in beacon.  

Actually a lot of female laughter and friendship fills this untamed, very sweary play, which pays no heed to today’s new puritanism. It never even gets round to condemning the randy Bob (James Atherton), and the sex is treated as something that pals Rita and Sue (touchingly played by Taj Atwal and Gemma Dobson) look forward to.

It’s a shame that the uncertain direction of the recently instated Kate Wasserberg often feels cartoonishly ‘grim oop North’.

Memorable, though, are Samantha Robinson as Bob’s betrayed wife Michelle, David Walker as Sue’s drunken slob dad, and Sally Bankes as her mum – a bulldozer in hair-curlers.

 

The Here And This And Now 

Southwark Playhouse, London                                                   Until Feb 10 

1hr 20mins

Rating:

Glenn Waldron’s clever black comedy opens with a team of sales reps on an away-day. They work for a second-rate pharma company that makes a second-rate treatment for liver spots.

They’re honing the cheesy patter meant to schmooze them past receptionists and in to see the senior consultants who hold the purse strings. If they do well and stick it for a few years, they might make the promised land of head office in Woking.

Glenn Waldron’s clever black comedy opens with a team of sales reps on an away-day. They work for a second-rate pharma compan. Above: Andy Rush as Robbie

Glenn Waldron’s clever black comedy opens with a team of sales reps on an away-day. They work for a second-rate pharma compan. Above: Andy Rush as Robbie

Team leader Niall (Simon Darwen) drums into the reps the need to ‘Captivate! Associate! Detonate! Kill!’ when delivering their spiel. Some are better at it than others, and it’s clear that the awkward Helen (Becci Gemmell) just hasn’t got the right stuff. Meanwhile, in between practising their pitches, Robbie (Andy Rush) and Gemma (Tala Gouveia) flirt and are on the brink of a relationship.

Flash-forward to a dystopian future in which a virus has wiped out huge swathes of the global population, probably because the pharmaceutical industry has been uninterested in researching an unprofitable area. Niall and nervy Helen meet again in very different and disturbing circumstances.

Performed in the Playhouse’s small studio space, the play – certainly in the first act – might benefit from a less spartan set, and it’s a little too evident that the comedy is the spoonful of sugar that helps the message go down. Nevertheless, it’s funny and thought-provoking and, if not quite a panacea, could be just what the doctor ordered as an effective remedy for the mid-winter blues.

Neil Armstrong

 



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