The Birthday Party – Pinter’s strangeness reframed

Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party was almost universally slated after its London opening in 1958. One critic, though, defended the drama. Harold Hobson wrote: “Pinter, on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London.”

What was original and disturbing in the middle of the last century is familiar to the point of cliche today: the elliptical language; the pregnant pause, the air of unspecified menace. You can see why the director Richard Jones and designer Ultz place this new production between metaphorical inverted commas – to stimulate a sense of strangeness similar to that experienced by the play’s first spectators. While the intention (if I have understood it correctly)is understandable, the realisation misses its mark.

In Pinter’s realist, seaside guesthouse setting, a deckchair attendant, Petey, and his wife, Meg, have one lodger. Stanley (Sam Swainsbury) is an out-of-work concert pianist who behaves truculently towards the (s)mothering Meg. Ultz’s design dislocates impressions of reality – the single-room set is period-authentic, if minimally furnished, but chairs, table, Anaglypta walls and doors are all one dingy tone of brown beneath a strangely sloping ceiling.

Where Pinter disrupts the surface ordinariness of his characters through their language, its patternings of everyday phrases hinting at hidden meanings, Jones’s production presents the characters from the outset as peculiarly mannered; movements become mechanistic, at times puppet-like (choreographed by Aletta Collins); Jane Horrocks, as Meg, does well to convey a fractured individuality beneath jerky gyrations.

Here, the arrival of Goldberg and McCann (chillingly portrayed by John Marquez and Caolan Byrne respectively), who have sought out Stanley for reasons unexplained, does not so much introduce a new dimension, as simply intensify an already bizarre setup. The violence of Stanley’s birthday party and its aftermath come across more like Grand Guignol than drama.

Jones’s production feels truest to Pinter in the desolate tone of the plea uttered by down-to-earth Petey (Nicolas Tennant) as his traumatised lodger is led away: “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do!”

• The Birthday Party is at the Ustinov Studio, Bath, until 31 August