The Birthday Party Tickets

It will be ten years since Harold Pinter’s death in 2008 when one of his most famous works, The Birthday Party, returns to London’s West End. The show will play at the aptly named Harold Pinter Theatre from January 2018, celebrating its sixtieth birthday – it premiered in Cambridge before transferring to the Lyric Hammersmith in 1958. Now it’s back and has a cast of celebrated, seasoned theatre professionals stepping into the roles to pay homage to one of the country’s greatest playwrights of the 20th century.

Starring in this revival are three Olivier Award-winners – Toby Jones, Stephen Mangan and Zoë Wanamaker. Jones took home Best Actor In A Supporting Role in 2002 for his part in The Play What I Wrote; Wanamaker is a double winner for her roles in Once In A Lifetime (1979) and Electra (1998) and Mangan is part of the double act Jeeves & Wooster that won Best New Comedy in 2014. Now all three performers return to the London stage to pay homage to Pinter’s brilliance.

The Birthday Party revolves around Stanley Webber (Jones), a former piano player who now lives in a boarding house in a sleepy seaside town of no name. It’s run by Petey and Meg (Wanamaker) Bowles, a rundown affair. In the middle of a celebration for Stanley’s birthday, the party is interrupted when two menacing characters, Goldberg (Mangan) and McCann, arrive on the scene looking for Stanley. Suddenly the carefully crafted party takes a sinister downturn with nightmarish consequences.

This revival will be directed by Ian Rickson, who is no stranger to staging Pinter’s works. From The Hothouse at the National Theatre, to Betrayal and Old Times on the West End – both starring Kristin Scott Thomas – Rickson also directed the playwright in his final appearance (Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court in 2006) before his death in 2008. Rickson is in many ways the perfect choice to honour Pinter once again in Sonia Friedman Productions’ revival of The Birthday Party – an acclaimed director and a celebrated producer joining forces once more to do justice to an inspirational writer.

The Birthday Party will play a strictly limited, 14-week season at the Harold Pinter Theatre from 9 January – 14 April 2018. It is a must-see for any fan of Pinter, for anyone who has never seen Pinter before and for anyone who wants a great evening out, full of twists and turns and unexpected outcomes. It’s a worthy homage to an inspirational playwright & Nobel Prize-winner, awarded the prize for Literature in 2005, and the perfect way to kick off the new year. Book your tickets now to avoid disappointment!