The last Richard Jones production at the Ustinov, Machine, was one of the venue’s biggest hits. The birthday party It is unlikely to follow the same path as Jones’ usual, highly theatrical production, as it gives the impression of curtailing rather than breaking down the dimensions of Harold Pinter’s early work.
The play was originally conceived in 1957 and received a frosty reception from critics. They expected a traditional repertory thriller and saw something mysterious and complex. The triumph of the work is that it manages to juggle both in one sitting. Essentially it’s about a man kidnapped from a boarding house by two gangsters – the kind of work popular in cinemas and pulp novels. But beyond this basic plot, there are numerous theories about what the play means and who these characters are: is Stanley being recruited for the afterlife, is a man’s psyche being split into fragments, are they the state trying to clamp down on unorthodoxy? Pinter never set out to answer that, the work is everything he often said it was, and one of the joys of watching one of his plays is providing you with solutions to those questions.
So you would expect Jones, probably the greatest visual auteur in British theatre, to be able to produce something revelatory. But his production, while full of moments of elegance, seems to stockpile the characters, giving them one dimension rather than several.
Take Jane Horrocks’ Meg, the landlady. Horrocks has always been the queen of the mad, and here she follows a similar path, her Meg glassy-eyed and shrill-voiced. You get the sense that this is a woman drifting into dementia, remembering the tragedies of her life, the childlessness that makes her mother her tenant Stanley, the lack of sexual agency that makes her wistful of happy afternoons in the spare room. But while her performance is good, she struggles to convey the other elements of the role that the best performers do: the manipulation, the fear of invading outside forces.
Similarly, Sam Swainsbury makes his Stanley a tyrannical coward, shouting at Meg and visibly melting when faced with someone of real influence, be it physical in McCann or sexual in Lula (Carla Harrison-Hodge, struggling to make something of a character written as little more than a sex bomb – Pinter’s women have become infinitely more interesting over the years). In moments of great tension he freezes, caught in a Munch-like silent scream, his body tense, sliding slowly down the walls. Swainsbury is asked to leap great heights in the role, and on the way down he occasionally bumps into the bar.
The rest of the cast fares better, John Marquez is always exemplary on stage and his Goldberg is an elegant villain whose menace is always delivered with controlled expression. McCann Caolan Byrne gives the villain physical weight, his need for order expressed in his systematic tearing of paper into strips. Of all the characters, he feels like he could most easily have a life outside the walls of this run-down seaside guesthouse. Meanwhile, Nicholas Tenant makes Petey a stubborn everyman, although his late urge to resist, when he challenges Stanley to resist, doesn’t quite come across.
It wouldn’t be a Jones production without moments of theatrical magic, and in Ultz’s austere, monochromatic set, whose browns seem menacing in Adam Silverman’s charged lighting design, several moments stand out. In the third act, when Goldberg asks McCann to give him breath, there’s a beautifully choreographed element that makes the world more ethereal, and the birthday party itself becomes a nightmarish hallucination full of long shadows, sinking into darkness and screams. The work plays with distant whistles that at points become part of the rhythmic confrontation between Stanley and Goldberg, seamlessly sharing a melody between them. There’s a connection between these two men that is never illuminated, but remains unspoken throughout.
It’s certainly a fascinating evening, but one where the theatrical element takes precedence over the performance. At his best, Jones brings new insights into a play; here he merely poke at its many secrets.
