Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party was almost universally slated after its London opening in 1958. One critic, though, defended the drama. Harold Hobson wrote: “Pinter, on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London.”
What was original and disturbing in the middle of the last century is familiar to the point of cliche today: the elliptical language; the pregnant pause, the air of unspecified menace. You can see why the director Richard Jones and designer Ultz place this new production between metaphorical inverted commas – to stimulate a sense of strangeness similar to that experienced by the play’s first spectators. While the intention (if I have understood it correctly)is understandable, the realisation misses its mark.
