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JONATHAN BIGNELL
Pinter, on the evidence of his work, possesses the most original, disturbing and
arresting talent in theatrical London. [...] The influence of unfavourable notices on
the box office is enormous: but in lasting effect it is nothing. Look Back in Anger
and the work of Beckett both received poor notices the morning after production.
But that has not prevented these two very different writers, Mr Beckett and Mr
Osborne, from being regarded throughout the world as the most important
dramatists who now use the English tongue. The early Shaw got bad notices; Ibsen
got scandalously bad notices. Mr Pinter is not merely in good company, he is in the
very best company."
Hobson credits the play with holding the audience’s attention by being
“theatrically interesting” because it is “witty” and its “plot, which consists,
with all kinds of verbal arabesques and echoing explorations of memory and
fancy, of the springing ofa trap, is first rate.” Hobson compares its “atmosphere
of delicious, impalpable and hair-raising terror” to Henry James’s 1898 story
The Turn of the Screw: “The fact that no one can say precisely what it is about,
or give the address from which the intruding Goldberg and McCann come,
or say precisely why it is that Stanley is so frightened of them is, of course,
one of its greatest merits. It is exactly in this vagueness that its spine-chilling
quality lies."
RADIO: THE NATIONAL THEATRE OF THE AIR
Further theatre productions of The Birthday Party were mounted, and while
Pinter remained controversial, his reputation grew. But British broadcasting
played a key role in supporting both Beckett’s and Pinter’s work and changing
the meanings of their “brands” from elite bamboozlement to widely¬
recognized cultural reference points. BBC radio had already commissioned
Pinter’s first broadcast play A Slight Ache before The Birthday Party’s
disastrous premiere, on the recommendation of Beckett’s actor friend Patrick
Magee.'? BBC radio and ITV television were in the vanguard of establishing
the canonical roles that Beckett and Pinter would go on to play. The national
BBC radio service made Beckett’s work accessible beyond a London-based or
academic audience constituency. His 1957 play for radio, All That Fall, was
broadcast before Pinter’s Birthday Party was staged, and BBC had broadcast
a reading of an extract from Beckett’s From An Abandoned Work in 1957
and radio versions of extracts from his novel Malone Dies in 1958. BBC
13 Harold Hobson: The Screw Turns Again, Sunday Times, 25 May 1958, 11.
4 Ibid.
15 Hugh Chignell: British Radio Drama and the Avant-garde in the 1950s, Historical Journal of
Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 37, No. 4 (2016), 649-664.
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