Phil Davis on The Birthday Party
I was wandering around my local library in Essex when I came across The Birthday Party. I was about 15 and desperately wanted to be an actor. Here was this strange, cryptic play. But it was written in my language. It was the first play I ever read where I felt the dialogue could just roll off my tongue.
There were veins of paranoia running through this man, Stanley, who is hiding out in a seaside resort when these people come to torture and interrogate him. I loved the fact that nothing is explained. It’s mysterious, but sort of everyday. It’s like a puzzle. I still haven’t quite worked it out.
People overdo the importance of the Pinter pauses. Because the dialogue is all packed with meaning, you just have to let it breathe. The pauses kind of tell you how to do it.
I’ve seen The Birthday Party staged, but not for a few years. There’s a curious thing with plays you love and want to be in. It’s somehow difficult to go and watch them – I sit there green with envy. This is the first time I’ve done Pinter. Normally, in acting, you’re looking for a backstory and a through-line and asking, where does the character come from? You can’t really apply those rules to Pinter. You have to sort of stand it up, do it moment to moment and see how it comes out. It’s a particular, peculiar challenge, which is very refreshing.
Celia Imrie on The Hothouse
There’s an underlying danger in Harold’s plays, and he certainly embodied that. He was a magnificent actor. I did The Hothouse with the great man himself in 1995. My God, there were sparks flying. I played Miss Cutts, and got to do a scene in my nightie and kiss him every night, which was an enormous thrill. He was a wonderful kisser. I have very precious letters from him, always beginning: “Dear Miss Cutts.”
In The Hothouse, there is a feeling – also prevalent in Party Time, part of our season – that something very worrying is going on in the next room. It was all like a dream, really, and there are dreamlike sequences in the play that remain in my memory. It’s miraculous to be back in the very theatre where we did The Hothouse, surrounded by marvellous pictures of Harold on the walls.
At one matinee of The Hothouse, the casting director of Star Wars was in the audience. So I was cast as a fighter pilot in The Phantom Menace. It’s bizarre but true. I got the part in Star Wars by doing a Pinter play – two things you wouldn’t imagine going together.
Jamie Lloyd, our quite brilliant director, is sort of channelling Harold. We joke about it. If we come across a question in rehearsals, he puts his hand to his ear and channels Harold and asks him if it’s OK. Harold once told Jamie that all his plays are comedies, which is not what you’d first think. But there are hilarious moments among the menace.
Pinter at the Pinter, a season of one-act plays, is at the Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 23 February.
