Tag Archives: The Birthday Party

‘possibly apocryphal’: Anecdotes and Memories of Pinter

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Much of our time on the Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies project is concerned with locating, exploring and documenting ‘official’ historical traces of the life and work of Harold Pinter via various archives, libraries and published works. What we have also discovered however, is that a project of this scale focused on the creative output of one person is bound to uncover, solicit or otherwise happen across its fair share … Continue reading →

Power to the People: Pinter, Amateur Performance and the Questors Theatre

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There can be little doubt that Pinter’s professional career benefitted hugely from the commercial theatre sector in the West End and Broadway, from state-subsidised organisations like the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, or public broadcasting services like the BBC. One of the primary aims of the Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies project is to trace, chart, archive and contextualise every professional production of Harold Pinter’s plays in the … Continue reading →

Pinter at the BBC: What the Censor Sees.

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The long-awaited BFI DVD collection, Pinter at the BBC, is released today. Over five discs, the anthology includes 10 versions of Pinter plays made by the BBC between 1965-88. As all ten are new to any home video format, the release increases the amount of Pinter UK television material publicly available by 500%. In addition to the plays, the collection also includes a wealth of supplementary material – four of … Continue reading →

A Dialogued Review: Ian Rickson’s ‘The Birthday Party’ 2018

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The following dialogue explores the recent production of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, which is playing at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End from 9 January to 14 April 2018. The production is directed by Ian Rickson and stars Peter Wight as Petey, Zoë Wannamaker as Meg, Toby Jones as Stanley, Pearl Mackie as Lulu, Stephen Mangan as Goldberg and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as McCann. Set design is by … Continue reading →

The Peartaker: Pinter, Rudkin, and the Midlands

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This is the shine, the powder and blood, and here am I, Straddled, exile always in one Whitbread Ale town, Or such. Pinter, New Year in the Midlands (1950) ‘[I]n this gaudy, bawd-filled Midlands pub one even wonders if there is a glimpse of Pinter himself in “the clamping/ Red shirted boy ragefull, thudding his cage.”’ Billington, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (1996) Ahead of the project’s first … Continue reading →

‘A jolly jumble of theatrical cliches’: 1958 ‘Cherwell’ review of ‘The Birthday Party’

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Elkan Presman’s 1958 review of the original production of The Birthday Party in the Oxford University student newspaper Cherwell is one of the very earliest Pinter reviews to have been published, and has not been reproduced in its entirity since. A striking aspect of the review is the impression that it gives the reader of how (some of) its original audience might have registered the play – functioning through “a … Continue reading →

Sir Peter Hall, 1930-2017

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The Pinter: Histories and Legacies team were saddened to learn earlier this week of the death of Sir Peter Hall. Without any doubt, Hall was the most important figure in post-war twentieth-century British theatre, a director and visionary whose own history is a map of that period, and whose legacies are interwoven into the fabric of the British cultural landscape. He modernised the British theatre, elevated the role and artistry … Continue reading →

Harold Pinter at the RSC: Beyond The Homecoming

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Harold Pinter’s affiliation with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), the impact of the works he produced there, and his artistic relationship with its founding director Peter Hall are typically discussed in relation to early seminal productions such as The Collection (1962), The Homecoming (1965) or Old Times (1971). These mainstage productions at the Aldwych Theatre – the RSC’s first London base from 1961 to 1983 – have become canonical both … Continue reading →

Harold Pinter on DVD and Blu-ray: A Guide

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When looking for DVD or Blu-ray copies of Harold Pinter’s work on screen, a simple rule generally applies – if it was made for television it is unlikely to have been commercially released, whereas if it was a film it almost certainly has (but it might well now be deleted). This article is intended to serve as a simple guide to what has been made available and (where it applies) … Continue reading →