Oldal 63 [63]
JONATHAN BIGNELL
The connection between the quixotic theatre culture and this liberal but
paternalistic broadcasting support-system was a small group of individuals,
working within a powerful discourse of public benefit. While the discourses
of theatre professionals struggled for a while to assimilate Pinter’s work
into a recognized category, and they cast around for comparators, a few
important broadcasters quickly stepped up to bring Pinter into a cadre of
dramatists where Beckett already belonged. Pinter’s work was more accessible
to television audiences than Beckett’s, and there was an increasing divergence
between them as discourses around them solidified in the early 1960s.
“FORGET BECKETT”: REVIEWS OF THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
The Birthday Party, Pinter’s first full-length play, premiered in London on
Monday, 19 May 1958, at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. This was not the first
performance, since the play had been toured to student audiences at Cambridge,
and was well-received there and on early visits to Oxford and Wolverhampton.
The official Pinter webpage reprints the Cambridge Review’s response, which
called Pinter “a lively and assimilative new talent” whose play “owes much to
Ionesco, whose influence on the British theatre may ultimately prove as insidious
as it now seems, to those sated with West End dreariness, promising.”? This
ambivalence continued as The Birthday Party was described as both “adroit”
but “nihilistic, for no rich areas of significant human experience seem to exist
between the sterile level of reality at the opening (cornflakes, fried bread and the
stock question ‘Is it nice?’) and the subsequent gaping horror and claustrophobia
of a neurotic’s world.” One of Oxford’s local papers, The Oxford Mail, likened
the play to the work of Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot in its review, while the
Oxford Times noted its similarities with the menace and mystery of Kafka. Pinter
had already written a short play, The Room, commissioned for the opening of the
first university drama department in the UK at Bristol University, in May 1957.
However, playwriting was an activity he had only recently begun to undertake
alongside a moderately successful career as a professional actor. Indeed, it was
while Pinter was performing in a touring production of the comedy Doctor in
the House that he wrote The Birthday Party, commissioned by the 27-year-old
producer Michael Codron.*
? Anon.: The Birthday Party, Cambridge Review, 28 April 1958,
http://www.haroldpinter.org/plays/plays_bdayparty.shtml, (accessed 8 November 2017).
3 Michael Billington: Fighting Talk, The Guardian, Books section, 3 May 2008,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/03/theatre.stage, (accessed 8 November 2017).
* Samantha Ellis: The Birthday Party, London 1958, The Guardian, 2 April 2003, 4,
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/apr/02/theatre.samanthaellis, (accessed 8 November
2017). The play Doctor in the House was adapted from the eponymous comic novel by Richard
Gordon (1952), based on his experiences as a young trainee doctor in London.
+ 62 +