Nihil Carborundum or Never Let the Bastards Grind You Down

David Baron was a jobbing actor in the mid-fifties when repertory theatres were liberally scattered throughout the provinces. He worked in Torquay, in Birmingham, in Palmers Green, in Eastbourne and, in 1957, toured round the country in Doctor In The House. During this tour he tried his hand at writing his first full-length play, The Birthday Party.

It was a fairly desperate time for the actor/playwright, who used his real name, Harold Pinter, as author. He had an actress wife, Vivien Merchant, whose rep. career was rather more successful than her husband's, but after their marriage broke up her acting was put on hold due to pregnancy. Without any money to care for a wife and the baby son, Daniel, Pinter grasped at a straw when a young commercial producer, Michael Codron, decided to produce the play in a season of new writing at the Lyric Hammersmith.

Codron thought it an excellent play and gave it a short provincial tour to Cambridge ("The great ovation given to the play last night showed appreciation and a little puzzlement", Cambridge Daily News), Wolverhampton, where the response was equally enthusiastic ? in spite of the play being booked on the strength of its leading man, John Slater, who usually played in rollicking comedy ? and Oxford ("Brilliant, baffling and bizarre - Kafka spiced with humour", Oxford Times.) At Hammersmith the audience, full of Pinter's old Hackney friends, received the play well, but next morning the critics gave catastrophic reviews. The theatre manager suggested to Codron that, with a "fabulous thriller" waiting to replace the Pinter, it should be withdrawn after the Saturday performance. Codron later bitterly regretted agreeing to this, saying "When you see it now it's difficult to see why audiences should have found it bewildering." One critic, Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times, raved about the play, but it had closed the night before the paper appeared.

In those days conventional drama gave rational solutions to explicit problems. It just shows how much conventions and expectations have changed that now we happily accept Pinter's comedy of menace and the absurdity that seems to reflect real life more precisely than the contrived comedies and dramas of fifty years ago.

Pinter's method of using a strong image to create a dramatic situation was the genesis of the play. In 1954, almost straight from drama school, David Baron's lowly job as understudy also demanded his stage appearance to work the head of a horse in a play by L. du Garde Peach at Eastbourne. He arrived on a wet Sunday night looking for cheap lodgings. A man in a bar said that he could show him some digs, "But I wouldn't recommend them exactly." Rather desperate, Pinter followed him and found a large landlady, a little man, the landlord, and a solitary lodger. The other lodger, with whom Pinter shared the attic, when asked what he did, replied, "I'm a pianist. I used to play for the concert party here, but I gave it up." This experience was recalled when, a few years later, Pinter began his first full-length play. It reflects the many pot-boilers in which Pinter played in repertory and works as a populist thriller, a political play about the need for resistance and, of course, as an absurd comedy.

This very funny, slightly weird play is about to start its fourth major professional revival with Dame Eileen Atkins in Birmingham before coming to the West End. Marvel at it first, however, at the GWT.

BILL BRAY