Page 62 [62]
OCR
“RANDOM DOTTINESS”: SAMUEL BECKETT AND THE RECEPTION OF HAROLD PINTER’S EARLY DRAMAS o> 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. + 61 +
