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Salient: An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University, Wellington Vol. 24, No. 6. 1961.

The Birthday Party

The Birthday Party

Harold Pinter belongs to the new generation of playwrights, and his plays are nothing if not unorthodox. They need to be seen in a sympathetic intellectual atmosphere. When I arrived for Unity Theatre's production of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, at the Wellington Concert Chamber, I thought that I was plunging into the very cream of the Wellingtonian intelligentsia: the place was thick with renowned amateur actors, keen student types, and members of sundry faculties. I personally sat within hitting range of two identifiable professors and three lecturers.

It grieves me to report, therefore, that much of this cream was thick-skinned and coagulated. "I came to the theatre to be entertained," one lecturer was overheard to declare, presumably regretting he had had to miss Jimmy Edwards and his trombone, and as another trooped out for the first interval, he sighed to a colleague across the aisle: "Still two acts to go through!"

Had this play been ill-produced, badly acted, and incomprehensible rubbish, one might have forgiven or sympathised; but let me hasten to declare that this was one of Unity's best productions for years (all due praise to producer George Webby); that the acting was often superb; and that this play contains some of the funniest, as well as some of the most gripping, dialogue we have heard for a long time.

It is not for nothing that Pinter, although in his early thirties, has acquired such a reputation, and I fearlessly predict that one day his plays will be studied at V.U.W. among others of the same generation—plays by Osborne, Kops, Wesker, Simpson, Beckett.

For those who did not have the good fortune to see The Birthday Party, let me say that it presents a couple of simple boarding-house keepers, leading a gentle life of dullness and non-communication, superbly acted by Pat Evison and Ronald Lynn. Into this sad, comic, dull, repetitive world, two half-sinister, half-comic, representatives of a pseudo-I.R.A. organisation arrive, and begin brain-washing another guest, with a technique that is all the more terrifying in that Pinter never explains what the poor man's crime really was. Having reduced him to a cringing zombie, they depart with him, and the sad, comic dialogue of the first act returns. For those faculty members who did not understand it, the play is a mirror of the ordinary man who continued to spoon down his cornflakes and read his paper while Eichmann planned his gas-ovens, while Beria built his labour-camps, and while South African policemen wield their bullwhips. What, after all, can one do?— except make a suicidal gesture of protest? asks Pinter. "Why don't you come with us?" asks the brainwasher, as they drag away the limp body of their mentally-dead victim; but the little man who had raised a mild protest at this action shambles back to his seat and lets them go. He picks up his Daily Mirror, and starts to read it: what, after all, can one do?

Special praise to Grant Tilly and Ralph McAllister for their parts as the interrogators and one might also mention Russell Duncan in a very exacting role as the victim, and Mary Stephenson for a skilful portraying of "the girl next door."

A.Y.M.

Executive officers of the New Zealand Universities' Press Council 1961-1962 will be as follows:—

President: D. P. Billings.

Publications: M. J. Moriarty.

Vice-President: Steve O'Regan.;

Secretary-Treasurer: D. Jamieson.

Assistant-Secretary-Treasurer: A. Robb.

[With Steve as Vice-President it seems that this year we will be having a really hard-working man on the job.]

"There is a presupposition that the child must be created by the woman ..."

Voice: "I can't believe it!"

* * *

"For some years now, I have been interested in the breeding of dog.';."—Mr Daniels ... "I Have Found Some Things Out."

Voice: "Dogs and sheep don't go together!"