Pinter 6. Pinter at the Pinter Season.

Harold Pinter Theatre. January 7, 2019

First up in 2019 Pinter. Start as you mean to go on, right?

This is superb and I was lucky enough to stay for the post show Q and A with Jamie Lloyd and members of the cast. Such a treat.

Party Time has that air of menace about it as all cast members are on stage, sat facing the audience inches from the action for the whole piece. It’s a party with people schmoozing. They’re obviously rich or nouveau with a member of the aristocracy thrown in for good measure. It felt old school east end gang land with Phil Davis as the established boss and John Simm as the arriviste. Jamie Lloyd later talked of an air of gathering of a new fascist movement. There is talk of “rounding them up” and at the end we see Jimmy who’s been rounded up – tortured and wearing an electronic tag.

The staging is powerful, dark, unnerving and tense. Super stuff.

And then we get Celebration a play from 2000 first performed at the Almeida. It’s a posh restaurant. It’s two different parties – one is two couples who are celebrating a wedding anniversary and one is a banker and his wife. The couples are brash and vulgar throwing money around. The banker and his wife are equally crass.

Conversations in both plays seem stilted, no one seems to be listening. No one seems to care. Apart from the woman asking to see Jimmy in Party Time and the waiter in Celebration.

The waiter is a superb part. The juxtaposition of his seemingly knowledgable conversation (He’s certainly able to name a lot of cultural and political icons) to the vulgar conversations of money and ego of the others is very funny and very sad. And his speech at the end hints at a simplicity that you can find in life if you just stop and watch and listen.

Lloyd allows the text to shine. I LOVED it.

5/5 Quality (imagine Danny Dyer saying this)