Two Pinter Plays

Seagull Theatre Club at the Seagull Theatre, Lowestoft

Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 5 September 2008

Two Pinter Plays

It’s good to see the Seagull enjoy a pair of less famous Pinter plays. Good to experience his comedy of menace.

Matthew Elliott makes his directorial debut with a young cast who meet the Pinter awkwardness, repetition and exposure of fractured relationships with maturity.

In Party Time, upper-class people cocktail away while an unspecified revolution strangles the streets around. Subtly pilitical, it flows between the unspoken horror of a thriller and soime hilarious writing.

Richard Boakes is directed to let a sinister edge flow from within. Matthew Thomas is one of their number they have done away with – a ghost with the chill of the grave about him.

It’s an appetiser for the main course with Celebration, using the same cast, a gem of dark humour about ageing, loneliness and the human condition.

Two couples ae celebrating an anniversary. Lee Johnson, Richard Boakes, Sharn McDonald and Sheena Gregory sustain their wary, drunken evening, while another couple (Oli Budgen and Holly Drake) convey mutual loathing wrapped in jokes.

Lawrie Groom as the sad waiter obsessed with his real or imaginary grandfather is priceless. Yasmeen Khalaf is spot-on as the waitress, with Matthew Thomas as the maitre d’, both avuncular yet spooky.