An amateur theatre programme, printed on cheap green paper in Lancashire in November 1959, has turned up in the personal papers of the only English playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The programme lay in one of 60 boxes of documents that were transferred to the British Library by Harold Pinter in 1993.
The performance marked a turning point in his life, 18 months after his first full-length play, The Birthday Party, had been savaged by London critics and abandoned after eight performances in May 1958.
A ‘threadbare’ existence
At the time of the Bolton performance, Pinter and his wife, the actress Vivien Merchant, were living with their baby son in a tiny London flat. Vivien Merchant could not work. Pinter said later that life at 373, Chiswick High Road, in the house where he had encountered the tramp who became the central character of his next play, had been “threadbare”.
The tramp lurking on the stairs to Pinter’s flat became Davies, the wheedling derelict first conjured on stage in London by the actor Donald Pleasance in April 1960.
Pinter told his biographer Michael Billington about a later encounter with the tramp after he had written The Caretaker.
“I met him one day on Chiswick roundabout. We had a chat and I asked him how he was getting on. I didn’t mention the play, which I’d by then written, because he wouldn’t have known what a play was … That sounds a little condescending, since I hardly knew what a play was myself.
“I’d like you to remember that my life was writing on my old typewriter – with Daniel crawling about my feet – and the round of the Labour Exchange and the odd half-pint at the Robin Hood and Little John down the road. It was a very threadbare existence… very… I was totally out of work. So I was very close to this old derelict’s world, in a way.”
In between acting jobs in provincial ‘rep’ under the stage name of David Baron, the clever grammar school boy from Hackney had been making ends meet by signing on the dole or working in London as a doorman, dishwasher, waiter, bouncer and snowshifter.
The Birthday Party, based on his experience of “filthy theatrical digs in Eastbourne” had been well received when first performed at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge on April 28, 1958. The weekly Oxford Times said, “It is brilliant, baffling and bizarre – Kafka, almost, spiced with humour”.
The Birthday Party – a “disaster” (at first)
One month later, on May 19, 1958, produced by a young Michael Codron, 27, the play opened in London at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, with a professional cast including Beatrix Lehmann, Richard Pearson and John Slater.
It was a disaster, described 44 years later by Samantha Ellis in the Guardian:
“The capital’s critics mauled it. They didn’t mention his soon-to-be-famous pauses, and they didn’t hesitate before slamming the play. ‘Sorry, Mr Pinter, you’re just not funny enough’, was the headline to Milton Shulman’s review in the Evening Standard, while the News Chronicle ran with: ‘Mr Pinter Misses His Target.’
“Others complained that the play was ‘puzzling’ (Times) and ‘bewildering’ (Illustrated London News). The Manchester Guardian’s critic gave up trying to summarise the plot, saying: ‘What all this means, only Mr Pinter knows, for as his characters speak in non-sequiturs, half-gibberish, and lunatic ravings, they are unable to explain.’
“One critic missed the opening night. The Sunday Times’s Harold Hobson went to the Thursday matinée, where he joined an audience of seven, including the beleaguered playwright.”
Michael Codron had advanced Pinter 50 pounds that week so that Pinter could stay off work and see a London performance of his play. Pinter remembered arriving at the theatre a little late for the Thursday matinée. When he explained to an usherette that although he was late, he was actually the author, she said, “Oh… you poor chap. Listen. The dress circle’s closed, but why don’t you go in? Go in and sit down, darling, if you like, go on.”
Harold Hobson – “terror everywhere”
Pinter looked down on an audience of six. One of them was Harold Hobson of the Sunday Times. Box office takings for the eight performances of the play at the Lyric amounted to 260 pounds, 11 shillings and fivepence. Michael Codron, today’s titan of the West End and Broadway, accepted a deal from the theatre owners to cut his losses and allow the theatre to close the play on Saturday evening, just when the presses of the Sunday Times were rolling with a famous theatre review by Harold Hobson:
“There is something in your past – it does not matter what – which will catch up with you. Though you go to the uttermost parts of the earth, and hide yourself in the most obscure lodgings in the least popular of towns, one day there is a possibility that two men will appear. They will be looking for you and you cannot get away. And someone will be looking for them too. There is terror everywhere.”
Hobson praised the author who had been watching that same performance from the empty dress circle.
“Deliberately, I am willing to risk whatever reputation I have as a judge of plays by saying that The Birthday Party is not a fourth, not even a second, but a first; and that Pinter, on the evidence of his work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London.
“Theatrically speaking, The Birthday Party is absorbing. It is witty. Its characters — the big, oafish lodger in the slatternly seaside boarding house whose lethargy is subject to such strange bursts of alarm, the plain, middle-aged woman who becomes girlishly gay, the two visitors, one so spruce and voluble, the other so mysteriously frightened — are fascinating. The plot is first-rate. The whole play has the same atmosphere of delicious, impalpable and hair-raising terror that makes The Turn of the Screw one of the best stories in the world.
“Pinter has got hold of a primary factor of existence. We live on the verge of disaster.”
Enter Irving Wardle, (1929–2023), Bolton School and Wadham College, Oxford, the man of the hour. Working in London as a sub-editor at the Times Literary Supplement he contributed a fortnightly theatre column under the byline ‘Sancho’ tothe Bolton Evening News, an ambitious, family owned provincial newspaper where his father worked as the office librarian. His father, John Wardle, had been a repertory actor at the Gaiety in Manchester and reviewed local plays for the Bolton Evening News under the byline ‘Panza’.
‘Sancho’ published a “reflective and highly appreciative” review of the jinxed play in the Bolton Evening News on Saturday, June 21, 1958.
Irving Wardle could see what had “flared up briefly” at the Lyric, Hammersmith.
“Mr Pinter is an actor and his method of composition is the reverse of setting out cold-bloodedly to embody a theme in action. He begins with the intrinsically theatrical and lets it work its own way back towards common sense: and his imagination works energetically enough for this approach to be entirely justified.”
In an article for the July/August 1958 edition of the radical theatre magazine Encore, Wardle went further:
“Peter Wood’s production, which seized tigerishly on the play and left it picked clean, contained two major performances – Beatrix Lehmann’s Meg (the landlady), and Richard Pearson’s Stanley. How these came to be cold-shouldered in the Press is a puzzle more unfathomable than any set by Mr. Pinter.”
In the September/October edition of Encore, Wardle coined the phrase “comedy of menace”, derived from the subtitle of a play by David Campton, to describe a number of new plays, especially The Birthday Party and an earlier Pinter play The Dumb Waiter.
Wardle and his father arranged for the Bolton Little Theatre to write to Pinter and ask him to allow a cast of amateurs to attempt a performance of the play at the theatre, which had been founded by his father in 1931 and based, since 1934, in a redundant industrial forge next to the municipal gasworks in Hanover Street.
The producer would be Wardle’s stepmother, Norma Wilson, a professional actor in her youth, who produced plays professionally for the Bolton Little Theatre and the BBC. She occasionally acted in Coronation Street.
Michael Shipley, a retired Bolton solicitor who has acted, directed and produced plays at the Little Theatre for more than 70 years, said, “I remember being told that for the November production in 1959, the play originally selected turned out to be no longer available. An alternative had to be found at short notice, hence The Birthday Party. Norma Wilson was a very difficult woman at times, albeit a very talented one. The reputation of Bolton Little Theatre was very high, often because of her talents.”
Irving Wardle’s Encore article was also seen by Stephen Joseph, the founder of Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre, Scarborough. He was the son of the actress Hermione Gingold and the publisher Michael Joseph.
The Scarborough ‘scratch cast’
Stephen Joseph had tutored Pinter during two terms at the Central School of Speech and Dama. He offered the hard-up actor an opportunity to come to Scarborough in December 1958 and direct “a scratch company of actors” in rehearsals of the play. One of the actors was to be David Campton, whose play, The Lunatic View, was mentioned in Irving Wardle’s second article in Encore. Another Scarborough actor was to be Alan Ayckbourn, then 19, who remembered:
“We read the play and thought he was barking mad. It made absolutely no sense whatever. I can only compare it with the first time I heard Stravinsky, when I thought ‘This man’s got a tin ear’. But what helped us was that the author was directing it.
“And he was a mixture of an actor and an extremely nice guy and passionate in his belief that his play would work. So you went with it, to humour him. He cast me as Stanley.
“When he arrived in Scarborough, he was in a very defensive, not to say depressed state. We had probably three weeks to rehearse. I remember asking Pinter about my character. Where does he come from? Where is he going to? What can you tell me about him that will give me more understanding? And Harold just said ‘Mind your own fucking business. Concentrate on what’s there.’
“I don’t think he’d done a lot of professional directing before that production, but – much more than I am even – he was a total extension of his script. He was at that stage, I suppose, an actor directing rather than the director he’s become. Absolutely fierce about the rhythm and the pauses and the use of the silences, which I suppose is natural, because he was using words in a way that one wasn’t used to using them in theatre. An actor would be much more readily able to deal with it these days, I suspect, because they’ve taken it on board. But we didn’t have the mental preparedness to do it.”
The Scarborough ‘scratch cast’ eventually performed The Birthday Party for a week in 1959, at the Birmingham Theatre Centre and later in Leicester, when they were reviewed by the Manchester Guardian on January 13, 1959:
“Mr Pinter produced the play himself and he has drawn a whole series of first-class performances from a fine cast. Alan Ayckbourn, David Sutton and Rodney Wood play the nightmare parts.”
In May 1959, exactly a year after the Hammersmith disaster, Pinter and his talented agent Jimmy Wax agreed to an amateur production of The Birthday Party by the Tower Theatre Company in London. The People’s Theatre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne announced a performance for November 14, 1959.
This was to be the last year in which Harold Pinter would ever be penniless or unknown in an English street.
Michael Billington’s biography reveals that a producer at the London commercial television station, Associated Rediffusion, read the jinxed play and immediately called for Pinter. Peter Willes, a wealthy former Hollywood film actor, baffled the playwright by his initial greeting, “How dare you?”
“How dare you? I’ve read your bloody play and I haven’t had a wink of sleep for four nights. Well, I suppose we’d better do it. Who would you like to direct it?”
Willes arranged for Rediffusion to film a performance of The Birthday Party as the ITV 90-minute Play of the Week. It was eventually transmitted on March 22, 1960, to 11 million viewers in the Rediffusion, Granada, Anglia and ATV areas.
The huge TV audience included one Michael Billington, 21, an undergraduate at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, who remembered the TV play as being “like a hand-grenade thrown into one’s sitting-room, a terrifying gripping account of a nightmare invasion, with the director seeing the interrogative faces of Goldberg and McCann in looming close-up from Stanley’s point of view”. The Rediffusion film has since disappeared.
Waiting for his redemption by television, Pinter accepted the offer from the Bolton Little Theatre, provided they could pay for him to supervise rehearsals in Bolton. He arrived by train in mid-November and the Lttle Theatre arranged for him to lodge with Sarah Wright, the young woman chosen to play Meg Boles, landlady of the play’s grim boarding house, the part later performed by Dandy Nichols in William Friedkin’s 1968 film of The Birthday Party.
Wright, then 29, was no novice. At 19 she had played Shakespeare’s Juliet every night for a week at the Bolton Little Theatre, while taking her second-year art college exams during the day.
Michael Shipley was still at Bolton School when he appeared as a pageboy in the 1949 Bolton Little Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet with Sarah Wright and the future professional actor and script writer Alan Cullen.
“As Juliet, she was entrancing and so was Alan Cullen as Romeo. I watched in the wings every night”, Shipley recalled.
“At about that time I was at Bolton School and saw Irving Wardle play Hamlet. When I returned to Bolton from Cambridge University in 1959, I quickly made friends with Sarah at the theatre.
“At the Royal College of Art her interior designs had been chosen by Sir Lewis Casson and selected by the Queen for the royal yacht Britannia.”
After rehearsals with Norma Wilson and Harold Pinter, Wright let a friend at the theatre know that she and Pinter were sleeping together at her terraced house near a bleach works in the moorland village of Belmont.
Michael Shipley said, “Sarah never so much as told me that she and Pinter had a brief affair but she always said they had a great time together at the house. It was one of her happiest memories.
“Sarah’s house was a regular venue for post-theatre parties. It was not just a two-up, two-down terrace. The land fell away steeply and provided two stories of cellars that were great for party-going – within sight and sound of the water tumbling down the overflow from Belmont Reservoir.
“I directed her on many occasions at the theatre and she became a close friend. She and her son Richard visited me at my home at Great Asby in Westmorland and I have framed some of her drawings and paintings. As a raconteur, Sarah was unrivalled.”
The Bolton run
The Birthday Party opened at the Bolton Little Theatre on Monday evening, November 16, 1959. A headline next morning asked the very question that Alan Ayckbourn had put to Pinter in Scarborough, in 1958. But the local review was now well-informed, even lifting Irving Wardle’s phrase ‘comedy of menace’ from the theatre programme notes. The caption on a Bolton Evening News dress rehearsal photo, now only available in cuttings and microfilm, identifies only one of the six actors in the play, Nora Whittle, playing Lulu.
The Birthday Party is a six-hander and when I interviewed Michael Shipley, 64 years later, he was able to identify all but one of the six people in the rehearsal picture. From left to right they are Sarah Wright (Meg), Frank K Hoyle (McCann), Alan Cullen (Petey), Geoffrey Banks (Goldberg) and Nora Whittle (seated). “But”, said Michael Shipley, “I know that the man on the right cannot be Jack Featherstone who played Stanley.”
Pinter specifies that Stanley appears “unkempt”, “unshaven” and “wearing a pyjama jacket” – not the clean, white shirt worn by the sixth person in the photo. Picture research in the chaotic Bolton Evening News archive, rescued recently by Bolton University, suggests that the man on the right is Harold Pinter.
“It certainly looks like Pinter,” agreed Michael Shipley. “The practice was for the [Bolton Evening News] photographer to turn up very close to the dress rehearsal, usually on a Friday evening. The photo would be a composite photo of the members of the cast not a picture of a performance.”
The Bolton Evening News had announced Sarah Wright’s opening night at the Little Theatre with a knowing paragraph:
“Bolton Little Theatre, with Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” (in performance all next week) has been more fortunate. Associated Rediffusion is going to show it, but not until January. The cast, I am told, found Mr Pinter’s visit for last week-end’s rehearsals a great stimulus, and Mr Pinter seems to have left pleased with the way things were going.”
Wright eventually performed in over 50 Bolton Little Theatre productions and lived all her later life in the same cottage in High Street, Belmont, having at one time given up teaching to raise her son Richard, whose father she had encountered on a Yugoslavian holiday but who was later turned back by immigration officers at Manchester airport when he tried to reach her.
“The 1959 Bolton production is remembered in Bolton for all the wrong reasons”, said Michael Shipley. “It was a brilliant show, both visually and verbally, but in its avant-garde way it was way out of its time. Audiences in Bolton hated it and talked about hating for years.
“Those who actually saw it would frequently mention it as a stick with which to attack anything untraditional. In 1965 we presented a review entitled How I stopped worrying and came to love Bolton,with one sketch entitled The Bathday Party. A few years later when Terry Hands brought his Everyman Theatre production of Waiting for Godot from Liverpool to Bolton for a two-night stand in Hanover Street, the general feeling of the audience was that it was ‘as bad as The Birthday Party’.”
Harold Pinter kept the Bolton Little Theatre programme in his papers and admitted nothing to anyone, keeping the same silence and secrecy about his brief encounter with Sarah Wright as he famously deployed during his seven-year clandestine affair with the Late Night Lineup television presenter Joan Bakewell. He eventually dramatised that affair without her knowledge in the play Betrayal.
Baroness Bakewell has recounted how she and her husband, the BBC TV drama producer Michael Bakewell, first met Harold Pinter.
They had already seen Donald Pleasance’s performance at the opening night of The Caretaker on April 27, 1960, and at a party later that summer:
“I found myself chatting to a stranger. We went outside to take the air. As Harold Pinter introduced himself and began to speak, I was captivated. I had heard nothing like it. A torrent of talk – brilliant, intense, witty. Just such a scene is in Betrayal.
“There was no exchange of phone numbers, no calls, no contact after that first meeting. It wasn’t until I went along to a rehearsal for one of Harold’s sketches that Michael was producing that I saw him again. His services not required that particular afternoon, Harold invited me out for coffee.
“But we didn’t go for coffee. As we left the BBC studio, we turned and walked up to Regent’s Park. It was a beautiful, bright spring day. Not warm, not too cold – just an ordinary London day.
“But for me it wasn’t. Something was happening in my head. My mind began racing: everything seemed sharper, louder, brighter, as if I’d taken drugs.”
Vivien Merchant never knew of her husband’s brief affair in Bolton with Sarah Wright or the 1962–1969 affair with Joan Bakewell. In 1968, she appeared as Freda, the taciturn companion of Roger the Bandit, played by Ian McKellen, in Clive Donner’s low-budget epic film Alfred the Great, shot on location in Galway and Westmeath with regular Irish army soldiers as extras for the battle scenes.
Sir Ian McKellen wrote to me recently in response to an email, “My mate was Vivien Merchant. Harold came to stay, read the script and next morning told Vivien he would divorce her if she spoke a single word that had been assigned to her. The upshot was that all her lines were given to me and she played the part as a mute – surely the longest Pinter pause ever!”
Oddly and perhaps significantly, Vivien Merchant, Sarah Wright and Joan Bakewell were all northerners.
Merchant (1929–1982) was born Ada Brand Thomson in Bury, Lancashire. She took her stage name from Vivien Leigh and the seafaring trade of her brother who served in the merchant navy.
Sarah Wright came from Horwich, six miles from the stage of the Bolton Little Theatre and five miles from Westhoughton, the birthplace of Robert Shaw, who was to play Stanley, the victim of The Birthday Party, in Friedkin’s 1968 film.
Joan Bakewell was born Joan Rowlands at Heaton Moor in Stockport. Even after three years at Cambridge University she felt she still needed to lose her Stockport accent to prosper at the BBC: “I’m on record as saying that I put myself in the lavatory and came out talking posh. I was stunned into panic.”
Neither Harold Pinter nor Sarah Wright can now tell us what was said and what happened behind the gritstone walls of the house in High Street, Belmont. Nothing much, perhaps. But that little green theatre programme did survive for 34 years in Pinter’s personal papers and we can guess what the week in Bolton might have meant to him from Michael Billington’s own experience of Pinter.
“The mystery of creativity can never finally be solved, but what strikes me, through talking to Pinter and his contemporaries as well as through constant exposure to the plays, is the extent to which he is a highly personal and even autobiographical writer. His work, to many people, seems objective, detached, ironic, even slightly cold; the antithesis of his contemporary John Osborne, who was romantic, impassioned, and who left his emotional scars for all to see. And it is perfectly true that there is no author’s spokesman in Pinter’s plays, no obligatory ‘nut’ of message and that he leaves his audience free to form its own moral conclusions about the behaviours of his characters.
“But Pinter, in all his major plays, works from life as well as his own subconscious and discovers archetypal patterns in his own and his friends’ experiences. Obviously there is no golden rule that covers all the plays and no fixed quota of personal recollection, but The Birthday Party was triggered by a grotty seaside digs, The Caretaker by a particular set of relationships in a Chiswick house, The Homecoming by Maurice Wernick’s action in concealing his marriage from his Jewish parents, Old Times by memories of Bohemian London life and triangular tensions in a London flat, Betrayal by Pinter’s experience of infidelity and Moonlight by a first-hand knowledge of separation and loss.”
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Sixty-five years after their first rehearsals with Harold Pinter in November 1959, the Bolton Little Theatre has announced a new performance of The Birthday Party, for 1–8 February 2025.
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