The Birthday Party at Theatre Royal Bath’s Ustinov Studio – review

The last Richard Jones production at the Ustinov, Machinal, was one of the venue’s greatest hits. The Birthday Party seems unlikely to follow the same path as Jones’ customary highly theatrical production because it seems to trim the dimensions of Harold Pinter’s early work rather than layer.

Originally conceived in 1957, the play received a frosty reception from critics who went in expecting a traditional rep thriller and came out having witnessed something mysterious and complex. It’s the work’s triumph that it can balance both in one sitting. In basic terms, its narrative is a man being kidnapped from a boarding house by two goons, the kind of work in vogue in cinemas and pulp book thrillers. But beyond this basic plot, theories abound as to what the play means and who these characters are; is Stanley being recruited for the afterlife, is one man’s psyche being split into fragments, are they the state trying to disrupt unorthodoxy? Pinter never chose to answer, the work is all he’d often state, and one of the delights of watching any of his plays is providing your solutions to these questions.

So, you’d expect Jones, probably British theatre’s greatest visual auteur, to be able to produce something revelatory. Yet his production, while filled with moments of panache, seems to blunt the characters into stock, landing one dimension rather than multiple.

Take Jane Horrocks’ Meg, the landlady of the house. Horrocks has always been the queen of the kooky, and she treads a similar path here, her Meg is glazed of eye and shrill of pitch. You feel this is a woman drifting into dementia, reminiscing about the tragedies of her life, her lack of a child that makes her mother her tenant Stanley, the lack of sexual agency that makes her reflect wistfully on happy afternoons spent in the spare room. Yet her performance, while well-delivered, means she struggles to articulate the other elements of the role that the best interpreters do: the manipulativeness, the fear of the invading outside forces.

Similarly, Sam Swainsbury makes his Stanley a bullying coward, screaming abuse at Meg, while visibly melting away when he comes face-to-face with anyone with real clout, whether that’s physical in McCann or sexual in Lula (Carla Harrison-Hodge who struggles to make anything of a character that is written as little more than a sexpot – Pinter’s women became infinitely more interesting through the years). At points of great stress, he freezes, caught in a Munch-like silent scream, his body taut, slowly sliding down the walls. Swainsbury is asked to vault great heights in the role and he occasionally hits the bar on the way down.

The rest of the cast fare better, John Marquez is never less than exemplary on stage and his Goldberg is a suave big bad, his menace always served with a control of expression. As McCann Caolan Byrne provides physical heft as the heavy, his need for order is expressed in his methodical tearing up of paper into strips. Out of all the characters he feels the most likely to have a life outside the walls of this run-down seaside guesthouse. Meanwhile, Nicholas Tenant makes Petey a stolid everyman, though his late urge to oppose as he calls for Stanley to resist doesn’t quite land.

It wouldn’t be a Jones production without moments of theatrical magic and in Ultz’s austere, monochromatic set design, its brown shades turning threatening in Adam Silverman’s charged lighting design, a couple of moments stand out. In act three, as Goldberg asks McCann to provide him with breath, there is a beautiful, choreographed element that turns the world ethereal, and the birthday party itself becomes a nightmarish hallucination, full of long shadows, plunges into darkness and screams. The work plays out with distant whistles, which at points become part of the rhythmic confrontation between Stanley and Goldberg, seamlessly sharing a tune between them. There is a connection between these two men that is never illuminated but lies unsaid throughout.

It’s never less than a fascinating evening but one in which the theatrical element takes precedence over performance. At his best, Jones explodes a play into fresh insight, here he merely prods away at its many secrets.