For once united, the critics voice unanimous displeasure at the sight and sound of comedians in the Theatre Royal playing Pinter for laughs. Pinter's people, a collection of 14 revue sketches composed between 1959 and 2002 by Britain's most recent Nobel laureate, assembles the combined comic talent of Bill Bailey, Geraldine McNulty, Kevin Eldon, and Sally Phillips, the whole directed by Sean Foley.
A subeditorial blunderbuss is brought into play to introduce Benedict Nightingale's hatchet job in the Times. The headline "Laugh? I nearly sent for the caretaker" introduces an article in which the headline irony is undercut by the reviewer's earnest confession that he was left "sickened by some of the coarsest performances I have ever seen in a London playhouse".
The Guardian's Michael Billington doesn't pull any punches either - "Pinter's people have been turned into lurching grotesques and the result does a grave disservice both to the writer and comic acting" - while The Independent's Paul Taylor expresses his dismay at the actors' preference for "crude clowning instead of finding the truth of the situation from which the comedy, the poetry and the pathos spring".
The main problem is widely perceived to be the fact that Pinter's humour, which, as Billington suggests, "lies in the words, as anyone can see", is ill served by the vaudeville-style renditions apparently favoured by the comedians. Nightingale is so apoplectic over Foley's decision to put the actors into "steamhammer/megaphone mode" that he can't bring himself to "name the actress who drove me half under my seat by ruining The Black and White". Billington laments the show's "mugging, limb-twitching [and] behaving like a beserk tick-tack man" and Nicholas de Jongh, in the Evening Standard, berates the actors who "frequently play at the top of their exaggerated voices and show off the bottom of their talents".
For Nightingale, there are a few saving moments in the show's second half, after "the cast calm down and let the audience listen, observe, ponder". Billington praises Bailey and McNulty's rendition of the sketch Night for managing to "rise above the general flailing incompetence".
The occasion also sees both Nightingale and Taylor reaching for the exact same introductory anecdote about Pinter's no-doubt apocryphal proposal to rename the Comedy Theatre the "Pinter Theatre" being greeted by Tom Stoppard with: "Have you thought of changing your name to Harold Comedy?" A rare critical unison, also confirming the rule that the less successful comedies always get the most amusing reviews.
