Theatre

Tamaritans presents Harold Pinter’s Birthday Party in Plymouth (review)

14th January 2010

The action in Harold Pinter’s first full-length play, The Birthday Party, which springs from the author’s personal experiences of a South coast boarding house, is simply stated.

The only paying guest in Meg and Petey’s boarding house is the unsalubrious Stanley, one-time pianist for a pier-end concert party.

Two strangers, Goldberg and McCann, arrive looking for him. For some reason this distresses him. Meg claims it is Stanley’s birthday, though it most probably isn’t, and at the subsequent party Stanley is brutalised verbally and physically. The next day the strangers leave with a spruced-up but now dumb Stanley for an unknown destination.

Perhaps the critic Michael Billington came closest to labelling this uncategorisable play when he called it ‘a rep thriller with political resonance’.

Its determinedly naturalistic setting and characterisation certainly serve to heighten the potent brew of comedy and menace.

That menace comes form the world outside the guest house and is intensified by the uneasy lack of clarification, indeed positively contradictory comment, about the past. Even seemingly innocent incidents carry hints of the sinister.

So, you can enjoy the play as a thriller, or mine deeper meaning in why Stanley is hiding from the world, what organisation do the intruders work for and what has Stanley done to merit such attention.

Niall Clinton’s meticulous direction ratchets up the tension remorselessly, to the unspecified horror of what happens to Stanley that night, while ensuring the comedy is never forgotten.

His cast is top notch. Rebekah Ash provides another finely nuanced performance as the slow-witted Meg, doting on Stanley, and exceeding motherliness.

Newcomer Lola Skuse projects next door neighbour Lulu’s unsophisticated energy and Geoff Strickland is the tolerant Petey, quietly getting on with his uncomplicated life.

Noel Preston-Jones has the tricky role of Stanley, ostensibly not answerable to anyone, content to love/hate Meg, and enigmatically the quarry of Goldberg and McCann, a double act in searing portrayals from Richard Haighton displaying Goldberg’s false bonhomie, and George Sutton McCann’s nervous brutality.

Fine play, fine production. But challenging. Tamaritans' production of The Birthday Party is at Plymouth's Drum Theatre until January 16.

BILL STONE

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