THE BIRTHDAY PARTY. To 31 October.
Tour
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
by Harold Pinter
TAG Theatre Tour to 31 October 2003
Runs 2hr 15min One interval
TICKETS: 31 October MacRobert Stirling 01786 466666
Review: Timothy Ramsden 30 October at Howden Park Centre Livingston
A Birthday Party with quite a lot to celebrate.Two things surprise at the start of TAG's Birthday Party: the colour-shock of the rear wall, with its elongated serving-hatch slit diamond-shaped to reflect the raised performance area, and the loud burst of rhythmic drumming. The point of the music becomes clear, its loud assertion mocking Stanley's toy birthday-present drum attempts. And the loud, vulgar floral-design decor sets an alarm going in the downmarket ambience of this seaside boarding-house.
Though the characters solely refer to spending time in south-east England, this is a seaside resort populated only by Scots voices. This only matters inasmuch as speech rhythms differ round the British Isles. On the down side, Goldberg's voyages into Jewish patterns sound strange; on the other hand Alec Heggie's Petey is a splendidly Scottish husband.
His grumpy toleration of Meg's verbosity - eye movements registering his responses more than his few words - is matched by the looks of complicity he shares with Stanley: it's a male society where women's ways are politely denigrated.
Their sing-song mocking of Meg's pride in her fried bread breakfast shows the male camaraderie, while Petey's adding salt to the cholesterol meal contributes its own bit to Scottish health scares.
Like Richard Gregory's superb Northern Stage Ensemble Dumb Waiter last year, non-RP accents bring their own flavour and life to Pinter. Katherine Stark's Meg triumphs over the common problem with this character: that her simplicities make her sound simple-minded. Here, they pour naturally out.
That problem's a hangover from the theatre of Pinter's early days, when actors and audiences generally expected stage characters to speak tidied-up dialogue expressing rationally-sequenced thoughts (hence the obvious disjunctions when dramatists wrote self-consciously 'insane' dialogue).
Pinter caught the jumps, platitudes and inanities of what most people say at times, especially when they have nothing to say but feel they ought to speak. It's not random, of course, but the coding is different from previous dramatic dialogue (even from his most obvious antecedent, Chekhov) .
Early productions made heavy weather of the Pause & Silence technique and often treated the inconsequentialities as needing over-emphasis. It was all to fit the speech into the supposition that everything was being purposefully articulated by people with clearly-diagnosed motives.
Both in the Tyneside Pinter and parts of this Scottish Birthday Party the problem's avoided - helped by Pinter's success, over the years, in nudging writers and actors towards greater awareness of how people actually speak.
The danger is that it's all handled so lightly, comedy and even some of the power-play is diluted (though this depends on each viewer's experience and expectations on coming to the play). Hollands certainly doesn't let up on the sexual side.
If Meg's a despised, dumbed-down Madonna, respectable Lulu - Jo Freer's character happily unconscious of the perils of meeting the summer heat with a micro-skirt in this male world - gets the must-be-a-whore treatment, not least when she's laid on the table-top in the birthday party blackout. Stanley's sexual aggression is made explicit - just as his initial banter had grown to fierce intimidation of Meg before his tormentors arrive.
They are less successful. Bryan Larkin keeps a mystery to go along with his massive presence, but Stewart Porter - while neatly keeping up a smiling appearance until challenged - tends to overmuch realistic physical detail, clouding Pinter's clear lines.
Still, the play's power doesn't depend upon nostalgia. I saw the production with a school audience. They'd just beneftted from a pre-show education session and watched with a keen attention that would put many general audiences to shame.
Petey: Alec Heggie
Meg: Katherine Stark
Stanley: Ronnie Simon
Lulu: Jo Freer
Goldberg: Stewart Porter
McCann: Bryan Larkin
Director: Guy Hollands
Designer:Neil Warmington
Lighting: Natasha Chivers
Music: John Irvine
Drums: Alan Emslie
2003-10-30 17:52:22