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“RANDOM DOTTINESS”: SAMUEL BECKETT AND
THE RECEPTION OF HAROLD PINTER’S EARLY DRAMAS
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JONATHAN BIGNELL
ABSTRACT
This essay analyzes the significance of Samuel Beckett to the British reception of
the playwright Harold Pinter’s early work. Pinter’s first professionally produced
play was The Birthday Party, performed in London in 1958. Newspaper critics
strongly criticized it, and its run was immediately cancelled. Beckett played
an important role in this story, through the association of Pinter’s name with
a Beckett “brand” which was used in reviews of The Birthday Party to sum up
what was wrong with Pinter’s play. Both Beckett and Pinter signified obscurity,
foreignness and perversity. Rather than theatre, it was broadcasting of their
dramas that cemented Beckett’s and Pinter’s public reputations. The BBC
Head of Drama, Martin Esslin, backed both writers, and the BBC producer
and friend of Beckett’s Donald McWhinnie produced Pinter’s first broadcast
play in 1959. Radio, and later television, helped to establish the canonical
roles that Beckett and Pinter would later play.
This essay analyzes how the relationship between Samuel Beckett’s and
Harold Pinter’s dramatic work was perceived in the late 1950s and early
1960s in Britain.’ The essay begins by discussing the premiere London
performance of Pinter’s first full-length play, The Birthday Party, which was
very negatively reviewed by the theatre critics of the London newspapers. At
this time, the critics’ power was immense and could turn a theatre production
into a dazzling commercial success or make audiences stay away and thus
bankrupt its producers. While not all of the reviewers compared Pinter’s
play with Beckett’s work, several of them did, and the reference to Beckett
was most often used not to praise Pinter but to condemn him. This paper
discusses what reference to Beckett meant at this cultural moment. It goes
on to argue that it was broadcasting, mainly on radio but then on television,
that lifted both Beckett and Pinter into landmarks in the national drama.
! Research for this paper was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant
number AH/P005039/1) as part of the research project “Pinter Histories and Legacies”:
http://www.reading.ac.uk/ftt/research/ftt-Harold-Pinter-Histories-and-Legacies.aspx.
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