Video: Played in Britain, The Missing Plays - 3. The Birthday Party

Michael Billington: The other play from 1958 is by Harold Pinter, it's called The Birthday Party, it was famously done at the Lyric, Hammersmith in '58, it lasted one week, closed on the Saturday. The day after Harold Hobson writes a review in The Sunday Times that says 'this man is a master' and compares him to Henry James and everyone else and says this is a great play and of course it had closed the night before. But what that review did was to put Pinter's name on the map; it led to Pinter being commissioned by the BBC to write radio plays and of course, the rest is history; Pinter became a part of our theatrical landscape. But that was the play that really established him, or didn't establish him but established his reputation.