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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 widelyrecognized 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. + 66 +
