‘Mad, wearying and inconsequential gabble,’ sighed the Financial Times in 1958. ‘One quails in slack-jawed dismay.’ Here’s the FT at the same play last month: ‘The best I have seen on-stage.’ How about the Evening Standard? Then: ‘Like trying to solve a crossword puzzle where every vertical clue is designed to put you off the horizontal.’ Now: ‘Pinter’s cruel dialogue has rarely sounded sharper.’ ‘What all this means only Mr Pinter knows,’ mused the Manchester Guardian. On its return to the West End, the playwright’s biographer Michael Billington, writing in the Guardian, judged that ‘The Birthday Party has lost none of its capacity to intrigue’.
Sixty years ago at the Lyric Hammersmith, the critics weren’t ready for Harold Pinter’s first full-length play, whose revival in the theatre bearing his name has been universally hailed (even Lloyd Evans joined the chorus: ‘a delight because it doesn’t bore or baffle anyone’.) All involved in that infamous first-night flop are dead. The only survivor is Sir Michael Codron, the producer who had the gumption to put it on.
Codron will be 88 in June and still programmes the Aldwych from an office atop the theatre (‘I’m just a figurehead,’ he says with characteristic modesty). He would become the midwife to era-defining plays by Joe Orton, Tom Stoppard, Simon Gray, Christopher Hampton, David Hare and many more. But The Birthday Party was the first time he stuck his neck out. At 27 he’d just convinced his father he was not cut out for importing textiles. He’d had a success with Ring for Catty, a comedy that would become Carry On Nurse (Pinter appeared in the play in Torquay), and had a couple of West End shows on including Share My Lettuce, ‘a diversion with music’ written by Cambridge undergraduate Bamber Gascoigne and starring Kenneth Williams and Maggie Smith.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in