It was the critics who are universally blamed for the original fate of The Birthday Party, when - after a couple of encouraging regional dates in Cambridge, then Oxford - it came to what was then the Lyric Opera House in Hammersmith on May 19, 1958, and abruptly closed just eight performances later after a run of only a week. Pinter himself wrote later that year to the editor of a university paper, “The response given to The Birthday Party in Oxford and Cambridge was most stimulating, involving a high degree of participation on the part of both audiences…. The remarkable difference in reaction to The Birthday Party on the part of the London daily critics and the audience in Oxford and Cambridge constitutes for me one of the most interesting features of the progress of the play. (There was, of course, no audience in London; the abstention counselled by nine or eleven critics was heeded sufficiently to bring about the abrupt closure).”
But it was also, of course, a critic who famously made people think differently about it, too.
Harold Hobson wrote in the Sunday Times that weekend, “Now I am well aware that Mr Pinter’s play received extremely bad notices last Tuesday morning. At the moment I write these words it is uncertain even whether the play will still be in the bill by the time they appear, though it is probable it will soon be seen elsewhere. Deliberately, I am willing to risk whatever reputation I have as a judge of plays by saying that The Birthday Party is not a Fourth, not even a Second, but a First; and that Pinter, on the evidence of his work , possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London… Mr Pinter and The Birthday Party, despite their experiences last week, will be heard of again. Make a note of their names.”
That much history has now born out; and last night, The Birthday Party opened again at the Lyric Hammersmith (even if the theatre itself is now in a slightly different location to where it stood at the time that Pinter’s play received its London premiere there - it was located further down King Street, and after it closed in 1966, was dismantled piece by piece and rebuilt on its current site, where it re-opened in 1979). The run is, rather weirdly, going to be nearly as short as it originally was (and will shut on exactly the same day, May 24, as the original production did 50 years ago), but the Lyric’s PR told me last night that artistic director David Farr originally thought of giving it only an eight performance run this time, too, which would have been pushing the anniversary element rather far. You’d need to complete the cycle in that case and hope for hostile notices today, and no artistic director could hope for that.
But just as Sarah Kane’s Blasted got, well, blasted on its first Royal Court appearance in 1995 (the late Jack Tinker’s Daily Mail review was famously headlined “this disgusting feast of filth”, and only the other week Quentin Letts, the current critical incumbent on the Mail was continuing that legacy, referring to a more recent Royal Court opening, Martin Crimp’s The City, as a “disgusting play”), so a lot of revisionism has followed for The Birthday Party (and also, of course, for Blasted: as The Guardian’s Michael Billington has publicly acknowledged, “Sometimes one gets it hopelessly wrong. I totally under-estimated Pinter’s Betrayal on its first appearance. I made an idiot of myself over Sarah Kane’s Blasted).
Billington recently wrote a Guardian feature on The Birthday Party that asked, “Why were the initial reviews so antagonistic? And what is it about Pinter’s play that has enabled it to endure? If one could only answer those questions, one might discover something about the vexed relationship of critic and artist and the volatility of modern society.”
Citing reviews like the Daily Telegraph’s WA Darlington who sympathised with the plight of character of a depressed deckchair attendant and declared, “Oh well, I can give him one word of cheer. He might have been a dramatic critic, condemned to sit through plays like this,” Billington notes that “What shines through all the reviews is a baffled anger at Pinter’s failure to explain himself. Who is Stanley? What do Goldberg and McCann signify? And what is the mysterious ‘organisation’ they represent? The persistence of these questions tells us a lot about the culture of the late 1950s, in which works of art were still expected to provide rational answers to clearly defined questions.” He also goes on to say, “The reaction to The Birthday Party also proves something else: that the visionary artist is always ahead of the critics and, to some extent, the public. There is a consistent pattern in postwar theatre in which ground-breaking works are greeted with initial incomprehension. It happened with John Whiting’s Saint’s Day in 1954, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1955, The Birthday Party in 1958, John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance in 1959 and Edward Bond’s Saved in 1965.”
Pinter himself was devastated. Billington reports Pinter telling him, “The morning after the first night, I went to a cafe in Chiswick High Road, ordered a coffee, and sat down and read all the papers. I was shattered. I thought there and then that I’d give up writing plays and concentrate on novels and poetry. I came back to our flat and said to my wife, Vivien, ‘I’m giving up the whole bloody business. What’s the point?’ Vivien, to her credit, replied, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Just go on.’ Then, as soon as the play closed on the Saturday, we went to stay at a guesthouse in a Cotswold village called Painswick, near Cheltenham. We went out to buy the Sunday papers and, although Kenneth Tynan in the Observer was lukewarm, I read this extraordinarily appreciative review by Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times that bowled me over.”
So the critics may have destroyed the play first time out; but one saved the playwright. However, I am struck by the answer given by young playwright Polly Stenham, whose That Face has just transferred to the West End, who was recently asked by The Guardian, “What’s the best advice anyone ever gave you?”, and she sagely replied, “The director Lyndsey Turner told me not to believe any reviews, because if you believe the good ones, you’ll have to believe the bad ones, too”.
But at least in those days the Sunday Times actually had a critic worth reading, and maybe worth believing. The paper’s continuing contempt for theatre - and the many years of diligent service put in by the real critic it used to employ, John Peter, whom it has now relegated to one of a rotating team of voices it uses - is shown by the fact that on Sunday its lead review of The Taming of the Shrew was penned by Rod Liddle; somehow, the paper’s editors think anyone with an opinion is qualified to write about theatre, and it doesn’t need or deserve expert commentary.
But then the days of expert critics are already receding, and it may be impossible to stem the tide: the Sunday Telegraph, of course, uses the paper’s diary columnist as its lead critic, who brings all the authority of that post to bear on frequently referencing pals of his, like Rupert Everett, in his reviews, however irrelevant it might be. As Ian Shuttleworth notes in his latest editorial introduction to Theatre Record that includes reviews of Visiting Mr Green, recently at Trafalgar Studios, “Tim Walker offers a remarkable testimony in his Sunday Telegraph review of the show (its only rave) that Patrick Garland is ‘in my opinion this country’s greatest stage director’. Such fulsome admiration would be one explanation for the two separate plugs given to Garland’s revival of Brief Lives with Roy Dotrice in Tim’s diary column Mandrake as well as the interview feature he wrote about the production in The Spectator, and moreover his extensive quotes from Garland in his review of the entirely unrelated Gone with the Wind. Tim, of course, has previously been spotted rhapsodising about the abilities of Rupert Everett, whom in other pieces he has revealed as a personal friend and occasional theatregoing companion.”
I thought I was being very diplomatic!