4 - Tales of the city: some places and voices in Pinter’s plays

Summary

The double bill of The Room and Celebration at the Almeida Theatre in March 2000 provided a unique occasion on which to attempt to obtain some view or perspective on Pinter. Here were his first and his latest play, forty-three years between them, directed by the author, with an excellent cast, many of them experienced Pinter actors, four of them playing in both plays: The Room given an evocatively detailed 'period' setting, drab, utilitarian, a murky refuge warmed by a flickering gas-fire and filled with the depressing lodging-house furniture of the 1950s; Celebration took place in a smart, postmodern restaurant, all curved banquettes and ostentatious table linen, a glance, according to some of the first-night critics, at 'The Ivy', but replicated in many of the smarter establishments in the streets outside the theatre. Private and public, domestic and social: nice weak tea and bacon and eggs in The Room, duck, osso bucco and Frascati for the ladies in Celebration. Even the names resonate differently: ordinary or formal in The Room: Bert and Rose, Mr Kidd, Riley; and a less specific, apparently classless fluidity in Celebration's Lambert, Prue, Suki, Richard. This was London, and Islington, then and now. Pinter's plays have always challenged the critics, from the initial bewilderment over The Birthday Party, to their responses to later shifts of tone and mode such as those deployed in One for the Road, or Ashes to Ashes.