Harold Pinter
Sheila Hancock takes pride in her irascibility
This book begins with Sheila Hancock wondering why she is being offered a damehood. I must say I slightly wondered…
After 1980 Pinter began to write like a student troll: Pinter at the Pinter reviewed
The drop-curtain resembles a granite slab on which the genius’s name has been carved for all time. The festival of…
The night I kissed Harold Pinter
I think everyone was a little nervous of Harold. Including Harold, sometimes. He was affable, warm, generous, impulsive — and…
The last survivor of The Birthday Party’s 1958 première remembers the traumatic first night
‘Mad, wearying and inconsequential gabble,’ sighed the Financial Times in 1958. ‘One quails in slack-jawed dismay.’ Here’s the FT at…
Unlike most Pinter plays, this one doesn’t bore or baffle: The Birthday Party reviewed
The Birthday Party is among Pinter’s earliest and strangest works. It deconstructs the conventions of a repertory thriller but doesn’t…
I didn’t enjoy it but I couldn’t help loving it: Sunset Boulevard reviewed
Sunset Boulevard is a tale of fractured glory with Homeric dimensions. The movie presents Hollywood as a never-ending Trojan War…
American Buffalo at Wyndham’s reviewed: ‘magnificent, multicoloured, vast and tragic’
David Mamet is Pinter without the Pinteresque indulgences, the absurdities and obscurities, the pauses, the Number 38 bus routes. American…
All radio drama should be as good as this Conrad adaptation
The aching hum of crickets. The susurrus of reeds. The lapping of waves. The unmistakable noise of a sound technician…
You can't have Mojo and your money back
In 1992 Quentin Tarentino gave us Reservoir Dogs. At a stroke he reinvented the gangster genre and turned it into…
British empire? What British empire?
Here’s a tip for play-goers. When the curtain goes up on a garden, prepare for some feeble plotting. The glory…
Come to the Spectator office, Gareth Malone, and hear our 'Carmina Burana'
They’re now televising proceedings from the Court of Appeal. Great. As if I didn’t have enough to do already, keeping…
