Party Pooper

My review of 'The Birthday Party' by Harold Pinter, as promised:

Sulky, unemployed musician Stanley Webber lives in a seaside boarding house run by Meg - an archetypal 1950s housewife - and Petey, her mild-mannered, deck chair attendant husband (think, Jim in Raymond Briggs’ ‘When The Wind Blows’). When two sinister characters - the gangsterish Goldberg and his Irish sidekick McCann - take residence in the house on Stanley’s birthday, the already tense domestic dynamics within Meg’s strange little universe are turned upside down.

‘The Birthday Party’ was Harold Pinter’s first full-length play - initially a critical failure, now considered by many to be one of the classics of the modern stage. Indeed, it remains to be his most frequently produced drama, often tackled by ambitious community theatre groups aware of the play’s enduring appeal. In this instance, Bath’s Next Stage Players rose to the challenge admirably.

Staged in the round (thereby bringing the audience right into the heart of the psychodrama), none of the five-strong cast would have been out of place at a certain Theatre Royal, just down the road. Tim Evans’ interpretation of Goldberg - charismatic, with a psychotic edge - thrummed with nervous energy throughout; the perfect foil for Bridget Cassé’s emotionally fraught Meg. Meanwhile, Richard Matthews’ Stanley trod the fine line between pitiable waster and passive-agressive bully with aplomb. After that, everybody did the very best with what they had: a typically Pinteresque farce - all stop.start dialogue, simmering misogyny and heavy-handed attempts at edginess - lacking clarity or conclusion; in contemporary terms, a typical episode of EastEnders, but with real actors who deserve a much better vehicle for their craft.

(First published in Venue 794)