Review: THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, Theatre Royal Bath

If you're after certainty, then you should certainly steer clear of the revival of Harold Pinter's unsettling The Birthday Party at the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath. However, if you're up for an intriguing evening of comic surrealism mixed with creepy horror – think the Coen brothers meet Wes Anderson meet Kafka – this fresh take on one of Pinter's early plays is a must.

Pinter's first full-length play, The Birthday Party, premiered at the New Lyric Opera House (now the Lyric Hammersmith) in 1958. The critics gave it terrible reviews and the production closed after only eight performances. After the success of The Caretaker a couple of years later, Pinter's flop was resuscitated and recast as a work of genius.

It's easy to see why audiences can be baffled by the ambiguity, repetitious dialogue, silences, long pauses and mysterious worlds open to interpretation ­– given the adjective 'Pinteresque'. But I recommend persevering with director Richard Jones's fresh look at Pinter's eerie view of life.

It follows on the heels of the recent revival of 1920s expressionist Machinal – also directed by Jones and kicked off at the Ustinov Studio, before moving on to the Old Vic Theatre in London. Both productions display Jones's trademark tight direction, excellent casts and a rhythmic quality and pace to the staging.

Multitalented Jane Horrocks is the stand-out star as barmy landlady Meg Boles at a dull, seaside boarding house in the 1950s. With great comic timing, she acts her socks ­– or should that be lisle stockings – off. Her facial expressions alone are worth the price of admission.

We know from the outset that Meg's life is exceedingly banal, reflected in ULTZ's drab costumes and set in various shades of brown. Farrow & Ball hues, such as Mouse's Back, London Clay and Roasted Macadamia kept running through my head.

The only colour throughout is Meg's tulip-coloured party dress and her friend Lulu's (Carla Harrison-Hodge) pink one: two women trying to bloom in the darkness. Harrison-Hodge is as every bit as dynamic here as she was in Machinal.

Music from a Wurlitzer organ plinks away and a witty, windowed scrim allows Meg and her deckchair attendant husband, Petey (Nicolas Tennant), to peer outside, while the audience stares back at them with the same level of scrutiny. Who is watching whom and why? And which world are we actually in?

Pinter's absurdist plot involves Meg organising a birthday party for supposed concert pianist and long-term boarding house tenant Stanley (played by adaptable Sam Swainsbury, who slides from quiet depression to silently shrieking at the walls in seconds).

When two gangster-ish thugs, Goldberg (John Marquez) and McCann (Caolan Byrne) arrive they celebrate at Stanley's party when not interrogating him by torchlight. The duo ranges from being side-splittingly funny to highly sinister. We can't really get a handle on who they are. For starters, Goldberg has three different first names – Nat, Benny and Simey. And do we believe that McCann's a former IRA terrorist and excommunicated priest? There's a lot about fear of authoritarianism and control, from the hoodlums bullying Stanley and Goldberg sexually assaulting Lulu when the lights go out.

We are in Pinter's world of abstruseness where nothing is what it seems. While inevitably queuing for the ladies' toilets during the interval, a woman says to me, "I haven't got a clue what's going on ­– and it's terrifying." That kind of sums up Pinter is my reply, which probably isn't the reassurance she's looking for.

And yet, it's best to simply roll with it and accept it's the not knowing that makes Pinter's impenetrable words and pauses fun as well as disturbing. It's those discussions after the play in the bar about different interpretations of what the hell he means. It makes the audience work, but in a good way.

Petey sums it up with certainty, but also apprehension in the revival's final line: "Don't let them tell you what to do."

The Birthday Party runs at the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath until August 31.

Photo credit: Foteini Christofilopoulou

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