he English visitor so rarely learns what the natives think of his kind in the large and friendly land of the United States that the American premiere of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party was a chastening experience in more ways than Mr Pinter intended. The hero’s harrowing breakdown, well conveyed by the San Francisco Actors’ Workshop, was chastening enough for both English visitor and his American neighbours in the audience, but it was as nothing compared with the realisation after the first act that Mr Pinter’s play was being taken by the Americans as strict reportage of the British way of life. At least in this production. “When I was there during the war,” drawled a grizzled American father-figure in the row behind, “they looked and talked just like that.” Like what? Well, let’s be as objective as possible about the Actors’ Workshop’s attempt to stage Mr Pinter’s living-room “in a seaside town in England” in the sophisticated city of San Francisco so many thousands of miles away. The living room as it appeared in San Francisco had a sickly green wallpaper no American would have allowed in a dog-kennel, a strip of grubby carpet that would have done for a road show of Hard Times, and a mantelpiece so well stocked with repulsive odds and ends that it looked like a shop window out of Love on the Dole. And into this seedy setting drifted characters who talked in a style that clashed American and pseudo-English vowels like cymbals “Here’s your cornflakes” was an early and resounding example of this clash. “Are they nice?” became something approximating to “ Ah thai naice?” Bernard Shaw would have had the time of his life. The ex-GI behind murmured to his companion “They talked funny just like that,” which raised the question of where on English earth he had spent his war effort. Those Americans who agonise in London over some English attempts, to play Americans could surely blush at this. Yet it was easy to understand how the play confirmed many of the American clichés about the English. They think our food is poor (Mr Pinter’s characters are served surely the worst breakfast in the history of the theatre); we are fussy about our tea (“That’s not tea, it’s gravy,” says the nerve-wracked hero); our conversation is devoted to the weather (“I think it’s going to rain today. What do you think?”); our homes lack the American comforts (see previous description of the setting); we have more than our fair share of eccentrics (Stanley the hero appeared in his deep glasses and clothes over his pyjamas, more like a Beatnik than the real thing along Grant Avenue in San Francisco); we are reserved, introverted, and infatuated with the past (Stanley is the most reserved, most introverted, and most past-ridden English hero even Mr Pinter has so for created). In the first act introduction Meg – or at least the San Francisco Meg – had her hair in curlers and slopped around as if she had just got out of bed, the perfect woman in a dressing gown after Yvonne Mitchell; Stanley peered at his tongue and looked every inch a man on the edge of a crack-up; and Lulu waggled in like every GI’s dream of the girl at the corner. “It’s so true to English life you’d never believe it,” said the voice behind me ecstatically. But when Mr Pinter’s comedy of menace began to rise from its preoccupation with social satire on the revue sketch level to affairs of the spirit the alleged Englishness of it all lost its importance. The able production rose equally above the handicaps of its phoney accents to reveal the international concerns of Mr Pinter’s characters. Even the ex-GI behind was no longer gently amused at those lovable old eccentrics, the English, but murmured “It’s so real you believe it.” Stanley and Meg and Petey and Lulu and McCann and Goldberg might even have been found in a different guise in San Francisco – at least for the duration of the play. Second thoughts at home on Telegraph or Nob Hills might suggest it must be a nightmare peculiar to the British and foreign to the good, prosperous, Pacific ways of San Francisco, but that was not the concern of the company. It undoubtedly did well by Mr Pinter, accents aside. The director, Glynne Wickham, Head of the Drama Department at Bristol University, knows an English voice when he hears it and was a stickler over accents in rehearsal. A member of the Actors’ Workshop recalled how he had described Goldberg’s accent as a mixture of Yiddish and Cockney. “Well, we had our experts at Cockney and our experts at Yiddish but putting them together was another thing.” It certainly was. The result is like a watered-down version of Edward G Robinson’s accent (than which there is nothing more American), and yet – which must have been a great comfort to Mr Wickham during his visit – the performance is effective enough to make most of Mr Pinter’s main points. Continue reading