'The Birthday Party'

  This week I went to see a very good production of Harold Pinter’s ‘The Birthday Party’ at the Lyric Hammersmith. The play runs until 24 May and is to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the play’s London premiere on 19 May 1958. As outlined in the last posting, reaction to the 1958 London production was not favourable. However, there are some letters in Pinter’s archive that show the opinion held by the critics was not universal. One man who saw the first night at Hammersmith ‘felt that this was one time when a playgoer could be proud to be in at the first hearing of a fine play…the cast was brilliant with the small flaw that the lodger kept reminding me of Dylan Thomas…’. Another was left in a ‘quivering state of shattered stimulation…’.

A few weeks ago, staff from the Lyric visited The British Library to look at the archive materials. There isn’t a huge amount of visual material relating to the first production at the Lyric, apart from the original programme and lots of newspaper clippings of reviews. What the archive does demonstrate is the amount of productions there have been of ‘The Birthday Party’ since its first showing. The popularity of the play extents far beyond the UK, with the archive including photos from productions in the USA, Holland, Turkey, Israel, France, Japan, Bulgaria, Germany and Russia dating from 1959 through to 2004.

Pictures show (from top) productions of 'The Birthday Party' in France, England and Israel.

Comments

[martha]

yeah, Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, was the playwright's first commercially-produced, full-length play. and one more interesting thing about it is that in London the play was "completely massacred by the critics''

:)

-----------

[Adult Birthday Party Games]

I think this is one of his best plays.