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This is not a show to beat the fifth week blues. And frankly, thank god for that. Dark, cruel, and deeply sinister, this new production of the Harold Pinter classic is a delightfully absurdist tonic to our horribly absurd time. With its story of a family reunion gone terribly wrong, the play is unafraid to […]
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Two hit men waiting to find out what the name of their target is for the evening, wait in the cellar of a restaurant. Between them, a dumb waiter occasionally sends down orders for Greek dishes they cannot pronounce and they send up the only supplies they have with them – Eccles cakes. And then, […]
Continue Reading✮✮ It seems too often that a reworking of a classic play is attacked for ruining the ‘original intention of the author’. But Simon Brett’s attempt to re-model The Importance of Being Earnest as a dress-rehearsal for a colourful amateur dramatics company called ‘the Bunbury Players’ really is a butchering of a play that requires little […]
Continue Reading✮✮✮✮ The intimate setting of the Burton Taylor Studio is a natural fit for Betrayal, Harold Pinter’s probing dissection of adultery. Bar an anachronistic silver television screen, the production design put us firmly in the 1970s – the age of turtlenecks, loafers, and lunchtime drinking, when a love affair could be exposed by an intercepted […]
Continue Reading‘Betrayal’ is a pretty complicated play in some ways. Try to sum it up in one sentence? No-one’s perception of the past, or even themselves, is ever true. Which aspects of the play are you trying to bring out in your production? What have you found most challenging about it? On the one hand, we […]
Continue ReadingA dark and profound danger sulks under Butterworth’s repartee. It is not precisely the same kind of darkness we find in Pinter’s early plays. The old master himself called this idiosyncratic darkness “the weasel under the cocktail cabinet”: in other words, an indescribable violence concealed by an inconceivable object. The nearest thing we have to […]
Continue ReadingFor true Pinter’s fans. Or if you want something radically different. Because even by Harold Pinter’s standards, nothing really happens in the play. Perhaps it is just as well that the play is little over half an hour. This is not to say that the play is not enjoyable. It is quite so. Set in […]
Continue ReadingFrankie Goodway interviews the directors of an unofficial Pinter revival.
Continue ReadingAakash Balani reviews The Birthday Party, showing this week at the Keble O’Reilly.
Continue ReadingLindsay Oldham previews The Birthday Party, showing in the Keble O’Reilly 23rd-26th November.
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