Pinter at the Pinter

Saw 7 tonight What acting! And what writing.

I too saw all the magnificent seven! My podium:One for the road, party time, the lover.

"A Slight Ache" had me shaking my head for the first five minutes, disappointed it hadn't been properly staged. But I have to admit it grew on me due to the expressive performances from the two actors. The language in this play is about as Pinteresque as it gets.

There was so much expectation for this "Dumb Waiter" that it was difficult for this to be matched by the performance but Dyer and Watson gave a rollicking Beckettish performance. Does too much humour detract from the menace of the play or are we simply meant to see it as a dark comedy? Take your pick. I do wish the director would have sat on the stalls toward the front and right, in which case maybe Danny Dyer wouldn't have spent much of his time half-hidden behind the jacket draped over the bed.

Quibbles aside this has been a triumph of a season and proof that serious theatre is still alive and well in London even in the West End. Might this inspire similar retrospective cycles to be staged for other great moderns? It's a thought although few, admittedly, have the range and box-office appeal of Pinter. Shame they left out Tea Party, The Dwarfs and A Night Out.

There's only one Pinter.... but for a retrospective of this nature you might look at Stoppard or Rattigan? There's a steady output of Rattigan but tends to be concentrated round three or four heavily revived works whereas there is stuff like "Adventure Story" that doesn't seem to have been put on since the original production. Also I think (and this is where Stoppard scores some points) it is helpful to be able to have one-act plays bunched together, seldom seen in the West End, and not all playwrights do this. There are of course writers with smaller outputs who could easily be done in toto in a season (Orton, Kane etc).

I don't know, some of this is personal taste but this is a business so I imagine the producers would need to look at box office appeal. There are people like Hare and, to a lesser extent Brenton, who do well. It might be interesting to see some of their early works when Hare was a radical rather than a Hampstead luvvie.

Chichester did a mini Rattigan festival few years ago to mark his centenary. The only major playwright i know who has a lot of short plays like Pinter is O'Neill.

Joem, Hare has some lovely early work, some of which was on the telly and could be revisioned for the stage. And of course there is Plenty, before the decline, imo, into political rant. Stoppard has a good body of work also done on the telly , like Professional Foul