Lyric Celebrates 50th Birthday of Harold Pinter PartyDate: 28 December 2007
Half a century after it premiered, Harold Pinter’s (pictured) modern masterpiece of menace, The Birthday Party, will be revived at west London’s Lyric Hammersmith, the theatre where it was first seen – and famously written off by the critics of the time.
Other highlights in the Lyric’s new spring/summer season will include artistic director David Farr and Zimbabwean actor Lucian Msamati joining forces to reinvent The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a site-specific piece on the theatre terrace, a reworking of Aeschylus and a new musical by lauded Icelandic group Theatre Vesturport.
The season begins with The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, running from 15 February to 15 March 2008, translated by Ralph Manheim, with Msamati playing the role of Arturo Ui, a vain gangster who’s both a ludicrous fool and a terrifying gun-toting tyrant. Brecht’s savage satire was written as an angry response to the rise of fascism in Europe, but Farr’s new production takes the playwright’s original vision and places it in the heart of modern Africa in a world plagued by hyperinflation and a regime governing through terror and extortion. A founder member of Zimbabwean theatre company Over the Edge, Msamati achieved wide acclaim for his performance in the title role of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2006 production of Pericles.
The season continues with David Rosenberg’s Contains Violence, running from 27 March to 26 April 2008. In the site-specific performance on the Lyric terrace, spectators watch and hear events unfold in buildings on the Hammersmith skyline. Part Alfred Hitchcock-style thriller, part surreal peepshow, the production employs audio technology through which audience members hear each whisper, secret and threat. Rosenberg is a founder member of Shunt, whose work includes Dance Bear Dance, Tropicana and Amato Saltone.
A major hit at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2006, The Seven, created by American writer Will Power, plays in the main house from 9 April to 3 May 2008. Based on Aeschylus’ The Seven Amongst Thebes, the production fuses rap, 1970s funk, R&B, gospel and blues with the high-octane choreography of Bill T Jones.
Following The Seven, the Lyric celebrates the birthday of Pinter’s The Birthday Party in a new 50th anniversary production directed by Farr, which coincides with the date of the original production. On 19 May 1958, The Birthday Party premiered at the Lyric Hammersmith and received almost universally negative reviews, playing to empty house for just eight performances. Only one critic, Harold Hobson, praised the piece, set in a rundown guest house on the South Coast, and celebrated Pinter as a voice for the future. Fifty years later, the play is regarded as one of the classics of post-war drama and Pinter is considered as one of the world’s greatest living playwrights, having been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. The Birthday Party runs from 8 to 24 May 2008.
After the horrors of Hitchcock and the menace of Pinter, Love provides a heart-warming finale to the season from 28 May to 21 June 2008. Written by Vestpurport’s Gisli Orn Gardarsson and Vikingur Kristjamsson, this romantic musical is set in an old people’s home and celebrates the passion of two elderly people who find romance at the end of their lives, and something to sing about.
In the Lyric Studio, Gecko performs The Arab & The Jew (18 January-19 February); multi-media company Lightwork presents Sarajevo Story (26 February-15 March), DJ/performer Charlie Dark joins forces with B-boy Benji Reid in Have Box, Will Travel (15 April-3 May) and Cartoon de Salvo blend improv and live music to create Hard-Hearted Hannah and Other Stories (15 May-7 June). The Lyric Studio will also present a full line-up of school holiday and Saturday shows for very young children: Shadow Play (19-23 February), Circus Minimus (8-12 April) and Little Red Things (28-31 May).
- by Roger Foss
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