‘Mad, wearying and inconsequential gabble,’ sighed the Financial Times in 1958. ‘One quails in slack-jawed dismay.’ Here’s the FT at the same play last month: ‘The best I have seen on-stage.’ How about the Evening Standard? Then: ‘Like trying to solve a crossword puzzle where every vertical clue is designed to put you off the horizontal.’ Now: ‘Pinter’s cruel dialogue has rarely sounded sharper.’ ‘What all this means only Mr Pinter knows,’ mused the Manchester Guardian. On its return to the West End, the playwright’s biographer Michael Billington, writing in the Guardian, judged that ‘The Birthday Party has lost none of its capacity to intrigue’.
Sixty years ago at the Lyric Hammersmith, the critics weren’t ready for Harold Pinter’s first full-length play, whose revival in the theatre bearing his name has been universally hailed (even Lloyd Evans joined the chorus: ‘a delight because it doesn’t bore or baffle anyone’.) All involved in that infamous first-night flop are dead.
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