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London,

Pinter's birthday treat

By Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard  13.05.08

What a triumphant homecoming! Almost 50 years to the day since every theatre critic but one poured scorn and worse upon Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, his first full-length play has opened again at the scene of its original disaster. In 1958 this Pinter piece opened and closed within a week. Now David Farr’s brilliant, dark-night-of-the-soul production, lightened by frequent shafts of black comedy — and the best version I have seen, ought to convince everyone of The Birthday Party’s classic status.

The play’s chronic mysteriousness, cause of such resentful bewilderment in 1958, fascinates now. It imparts a thriller or film-noir style menace to the strange goings-on and goings-off at the elderly Meg’s dingy boarding house by the sea. Here the reclusive Stanley Webber (Justin Salinger), a man surely on the run from himself, masquerades as a former concert pianist who performed just once — in Lower Edmonton. Then one morning two men arrive in search of him.

Pinter reflects and refines the essence of guilt-laden Kafka — a personal dread that the world’s savagery and injustice will be visited upon the anxious individual: sadistic agents of some nameless authority will come with mad questions and take us away. His characters speak vintage Pinterese — a language of menace, inconsequence and ambivalence, fusing cliché and individual turn of phrase. Jon Bausor’s sombre design of Meg’s seaside home, a view of the kitchen sink in the background, aptly conjures up an end-ofthe-world milieu. No sun shines on a summer day through the opaque windows onto the slate-grey walls or dull, brown furnishings. Sheila Hancock’s wonderful Meg, simpleminded and skittish in her Rita Hay-worth wig and floral pinafore, coos and flirts, drools and simpers over Salinger’s definitive Stanley in his flamboyant glasses, from behind which crazy eyes gaze.

No actor playing the role before has made it so clear that Meg’s adored, presumably agoraphobic boarder is in the grip of some mental disturbance. His walk and expression advertise his alienated oddness.

Complaining and a g g ressive, wheedling and pathetic, Salinger’s Stanley comes to react to the sinister duo Goldberg and McCann, whom Pinter likens to voices of coercive religions, like a cornered rat fighting for its life.

Nicholas Woodeson’s superb Goldberg, who keeps Lloyd Hutchinson’s bovine McCann under control, induces shudders of amusement with his winsome sentimentalities and silky, smiling menace. Farr thrillingly stages the birthday party festivities as a grotesque, grim comedy and the game of blind man’s buff when the lights go out, after Stanley is relieved of glasses, as if it were Agatha Christie turned sadistic and weird. Webber’s attempted strangling of Meg and violation of Sian Brooke’s over-refined Lulu, confirm his madman’s status.

Salinger’s Stanley appears shock-ingly transformed the morning after, when he reappears blank-faced, spruced-up and unable to gibber wordless sounds. Alan Williams, poignant as Petey, the play’s one humane character, struggles to save Stanley, appealing “don’t let them tell you what to do” as he’s taken away to some unspeakable future. A shockingly memorable night.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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