When Harold Pinter’s first full-length play, The Birthday Party, premiered at the New Lyric Opera House (now Lyric Hammersmith) in 1958, it was given a drubbing by critics and closed after only eight performances. Pinter’s artfully deliberate ambiguity of language, identity and events, disjointed, repetitious dialogue, non-sequiturs and loaded pauses - the very elements that engendered the adjective ‘Pinteresque’ and that have made this play a staple of the modern British stage since - were mistaken for wilful obscurity.
Done the right way, those Pinteresque pauses should ratchet up the the tension between comic absurdity and creeping menace. Despite the commitment of its cast who all performed with conviction and gusto, it’s the mishandled timing of those all-important pauses in this revival that is the culprit for why this production didn’t quite stick the landing on press night. The comedy didn’t quite absurd enough and the menace didn’t quite creep enough.
Otherwise, Richard Jones’ revival is bristling with good ideas. As if to underline the oppressive banality of this world ULTZ’s costumes and set are all an unprepossessing variation of brown shading into beige. That’s amplified by the windowed scrim lowered and raised between acts from which Meg and Petey Boles look out from their humdrum lives in their decaying seaside boarding house and into which the audience peers like voyeurs. This use of the scrim was accompanied by the distorted garbling of an untuned radio which in the intimacy of the Ustinov Studio made the play teeter between a fantasy, whodunit and something Kafka-esque. This production knows that in order for the audience to enjoy this play and Pinter in general, a certain amount of surrendering is called for.
We are never going to be sure, for instance, if anything is real or a figment of Meg’s (played with wide-eyed wonder by Jane Horrocks) imagination. Is Stanley really a concert pianist? Sam Swainsbury gives him a brattish persona that queasily shifts from incestuously needy to outburst depending on whether Meg is being flirtatious or maternal. And what’s with the shifting identities of Goldberg and McCann? Do Meg and Lulu’s bright party frocks, the only hint of colour amid the unrelenting brown mean they are oblivious to the predatory nature of the men? Does Petey know what’s really going on? Nicolas Tennant’s portrayal lends Petey a knowing but anxious powerlessness when he delivers the famous line as the play concludes with Goldberg and McCann carting a sedated Stanley off to god-knows-where: “Don’t let them tell you what to do.”
Is it therefore an interrogation of authoritarianism? The play poses so many more questions than it answers but that’s the beauty of Pinter for you.
Until Aug 31; theatreroyal.org.uk
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