The Dumb Waiter

Two “soldiers” in gangster parlance on a job in Birmingham, windowless of course.

SOHO BLITZ says the headline in the Daily Mirror.

One is a complaining sort, “I wouldn’t know where to begin,” he says when inexplicable orders come down, “the larder’s bare!”

Waiting for Wilson, they are.

One for the Road

The setting (this is presumably Pinter’s staging) renders effectively the remembered source of the play in Glenville’s The Prisoner.

This is one of the gobbets, such as Mountain Language or Party Time, that Pinter finally revealed as the magnum opus for radio called Voices, in which each of the discrete elements has a very definite place, and Victor is victorious.

Alan Bates’ Hitlerian hilarity in the adverse part is a long toying with the father, mother, and son at the mercy of a State official whose language is quite similar to that used in Schlöndorff’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

The Birthday Party

Pinter’s first version of Der Prozeß, on material also visible in A Night Out.

The playwright’s performance as Goldberg is very much like Sydney Tafler or even Laurence Harvey in Expresso Bongo.

Joan Plowright as Meg, Colin Blakely, Kenneth Cranham, Richard Lang, Julie Walters.