Party politics

It had been far too long since our last visit to The REP, and didn't this production of Harold Pinter's 1958 masterpiece just remind us of that fact.

The play itself is captivatingly strange. Set in a boarding house on the coast, it's focused on Stanley Webber, who is the only lodger until the appearance of two sinister characters, Goldberg and McCann, who put the unemployed musician under duress and induce him to suffer a nervous breakdown before leaving with him before the owners of the boarding house can mount sufficient objection.

It's not hard to see why the play divided its first audiences - it closed the same week it opened, but not before Sunday Times reviewer Harold Hobson had declared Pinter "the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London". An unlikely melange of near-slapstick comedy (particularly the dialogue between boarding house owners Meg and Petey), surrealism and kitchen-sink drama, 'The Birthday Party' also has a strong sense of menace, an underlying threat of violence bubbling away and coming to the surface on occasion. The adjective "Kafkaesque" isn't ascribed to it lightly - there's a sense of absurdity, bewilderment and everything only being half-explained familiar from The Trial.

It seems churlish to single out individuals for praise in such a universally superb production, but Dame Eileen Atkins as Meg deserves special mention, her nervous tics and suffocating mothering of Stanley played to perfection.