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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 +
