We really enjoyed this play and production. It is a rare example of a Pinter comedy, which he wrote during his heyday in the mid 1950s but I don’t think it got produced until a fair bit later.
Being Pinter, the line between comedy and tense psychodrama is a thin one. Indeed, plays like The Caretaker, The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter are sinister yet have plenty of humour in them. The Hothouse has plenty of humour yet is sinister; it is set in an anonymous government run mental institution. Say no more.
This was a superb cast and production. Stephen Moore, Finbar Lynch, Leo Bill and Lia Williams the standouts. Here is a link to the Theatricalia entry. For once, the awkward depth/shape of the Lyttelton stage could be used to good effect for an institutional look.
It was pretty well received by the critics on the whole:
This was a major revival of Pinter’s classic, directed by Trevor Nunn with a cracking cast including Imogen Stubbs, Douglas Hodge, Anthony Calf and several other fine actors.
Unusually, we got to this one late – it had been running at the National for a while, since November 1998, by the time we saw it, towards the end of its run.
Charles Spencer had given it a rave review in The Telegraph:
This was one heck of a good evening at the theatre. A triple-bill of Pinter. I think it was Janie’s and my first visit to the Donmar Warehouse, not least judging by the detailed notes Janie wrote down while booking this, including the full address etc.
Janie paid £15 a ticket for Row C centre stalls. Not bad to say the least, even if £15 was real money in 1998. In those days, the Donmar was still regarded (and priced) as fringe. Janie noted the following timings:
A Kind Of Alaska 7.00 to 7.50;
Interval 25 minutes;
The Collection 8.15 to 9.10;
Interval 25 minutes;
The Lover 9.30 to 10.25.
What a cast…or should I say, what casts – as this triple bill had a separate cast for the first play and then one cast for both the second and third.
A Kind of Alaska starred Penelope Wilton, Bill Nighy & Brid Brennan.
The Collection starred Harold himself (always good value as an actor as well as a playwright & director), Douglas Hodge, Lia Williams & Colin McFarlane. The latter three also starred in the Lover.
We thought all three plays excellent and the whole production top notch.
Nicholas de Jongh in The Standard only really liked the first play:
Our friend Michael Billington clearly liked all three, although he did share de Jongh’s view that three Pinters in one night was possibly a Pinter too many:
…we did the “theatre plus big night out dinner” thing again the next night.
Look, Europe! was, I think, a one-off awareness and fundraising evening for anti-censorship campaign Index, done under the auspices of Harold Pinter and primarily aimed and about Iranian censorship.
Fine cast too – joining Harold Pinter were Joseph Bennett, Anna Friel, Rhydian Jones, Andrew Lincoln, Roger Lloyd Pack, David MacCreedy, Nadia Sawalha, Nadim Sawalha, Christopher Simon and Malcolm Tierney.
David Lister wrote the event up brilliantly as a preview in the Independent:
Janie and I were both very taken by the evening at the theatre, which was good drama and very thought provoking for its cause.
Dinner At Granita
Then a few doors down to Granita in Upper Street, which we had been meaning to try for ages. Apparently the spiritual home of New Labour, as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are said to have made their leadership pact there a few years before our visit.
Tragically, not only were there no cabinet ministers to be seen in there on that Sunday evening, we didn’t even see Harold, Antonia and Co “after show”, which we thought must be a racing certainty.
We did still have a very good meal, though.
And to prove her superwoman credentials, after that action packed weekend, Janie went off at about 6:30 the next morning to treat her first domiciliary patient of the day. 25 years later – not a chance – we’d probably take the Monday off, if not the Monday and Tuesday!
We went on a Friday evening to see part of a preview run of this play/production, which went on to have a good long stint at the Aldwych and which had previously been tested at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford (according to my notes) and/ot Theatre Royal Bath according to the Theatricalia entry.
Anyway…
…I have always been partial to a bit of Simon Gray and also partial to a bit of Alan Bates’s acting and Harold Pinter’s directing, so this was a “must see” for me and Janie – hence the Friday evening booking.
Below is a rare review of the actual Richmond performances from the Ealing & Acton Gazette:
We celebrated our homecoming from the Middle East with a visit to the theatre to see this wonderful production of, coincidentally, Pinter’s The Homecoming.
What a cast. Lindsay Duncan, Michael Sheen, Eddie Marsan, Keith Allen & David Bradley. Roger Michell directed it.
This was a West End transfer from the Chichester Festival, which had been so well received that even we set aside our West-End show scepticism to see it in Theatreland.
We weren’t disappointed. This was a very good production of a very good play. It is basically about the denazification investigation of the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler.
Michael Pennington & Daniel Massey played the lead roles, investigating officer major Arnold & Furtwängler respectively. Harold Pinter added yet more gravitas by directing it.
Janie and I were very keen on Pinter and also very keen on Complicite, so we took the opportunity to see both on one Saturday during that crazy autumn during which Z/Yen was born.
According to my contemporary log:
Landscape is a short play, seen late afternoon/early evening before seeing “Out of a House Walked a Man”. Very good.
Ian Holm and Penelope Wilton. Top notch performers both,with great Pinter pedigrees too.
We do like a bit of Pinter. I was especially keen to see this one. I’d never seen the play performed live; this 1994 production was the first London production since the West End production in the 1960s. But I had seen the wonderful 1980s TV version with Pinter himself as Goldberg.
I’d also previously seen excerpts from the play performed live; not least by my own school mates in the late 1970’s when Dan O’Neill was selected for the role of Goldberg ahead of me because he could do a much better Goldberg accent than me. I don’t bear grudges but I do retain a sense of unjust cultural appropriation to this day, not least because I still cannot do a Goldberg-style accent. I played Aston in The Caretaker instead, but I digress.
Yes, yes, yes! We thought this was a really, really good night at the theatre.
I’d long been a Pinter fan. Janie wasn’t really familiar with his work, but Janie made the running for this night at the Almeida, booking us the front row seats we craved for that place (still do) and jotting down all the details. 90 minutes without an interval. Seats A7 & A8.
This play/production was our first sighting of Pinter together.
I think we ran into Ivan Shakespeare again that night; volunteering for the Almeida selling programmes.
Michael Billington’s review was on the front page of the Guradian – how often does that happen? Along with a luvvie-fest piece (I’m glad we weren’t there that night and a continuation on Page 18.
Also in the Guardian, an Anna Massey interview about Moonlight. Anna Massey went on to become one of Janie’s regular clients, but Janie didn’t yet know her when we saw Moonlight.
