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Celebration is a play by British playwright Harold Pinter. It was first presented as a double-bill, with Pinter's first play The Room on Thursday 16 March 2000 at the Almeida Theatre in London. [1]
The plot revolves around three couples dining in the most expensive restaurant in town (an allusion to The Ivy restaurant in London). At one table are sat two brothers, Lambert and Matt, and two sisters, Prue and Julie. Lambert and Julie are married, as are Matt and Prue. They are celebrating Lambert and Julie's wedding anniversary. Seated at another table are Russell and Suki, who later join the other party of diners. The diners' conversations are intersected by the existential ponderings of Richard, the restaurateur (a character based on the London restaurateur Jeremy King), Sonia the maitresse d', and an unnamed Waiter. The dialogue begins as an apparently ordinary celebratory meal for the diners developing into a complex weaving of more sinister themes, including undercurrents of love/hate relationships and incest. The play ends with a mysterious (and 'incomplete') speech from the waiter, which hints at a possible way to escape the pain of everyday life.
| Lambert | Keith Allen |
| Matt | Andy de la Tour |
| Prue | Lindsay Duncan |
| Julie | Susan Wooldridge |
| Russell | Steven Pacey |
| Suki | Lia Williams |
| Richard | Thomas Wheatley |
| Sonia | Indira Varma |
| Waiter | Danny Dyer |
| Waitress 1 | Nina Raine |
| Waitress 2 | Katherine Tozer |
In 2006, director John Crowley adapted Celebration for More4. It was first shown on More4 on Monday 26 February 2007.
| Lambert | Michael Gambon |
| Matt | James Bolam |
| Prue | Julia McKenzie |
| Julie | Penelope Wilton |
| Russell | Colin Firth |
| Suki | Janie Dee |
| Richard | James Fox |
| The Waitress (Sonia) | Sophie Okonedo |
| Waiter | Stephen Rea |
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Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993) and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.
Waiting staff (BrE), waiters / waitresses, or servers (AmE) are those who work at a restaurant, a diner, or a bar and sometimes in private homes, attending to customers by supplying them with food and drink as requested. Waiting staff follow rules and guidelines determined by the manager. Waiting staff carry out many different tasks, such as taking orders, food-running, polishing dishes and silverware, helping bus tables, entertaining patrons, restocking working stations with needed supplies, and handing out the bill.
The Dumb Waiter is a one-act play by Harold Pinter written in 1957.
The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, commonly shortened to Central, is a drama school founded by Elsie Fogerty in 1906, as the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, to offer a new form of training in speech and drama for young actors and other students. It became a constituent college of the University of London in 2005 and is a member of Conservatoires UK and the Federation of Drama Schools.
Patrick Albert Crispin Marber is an English comedian, playwright, director, actor, and screenwriter.
Betrayal is a play written by Harold Pinter in 1978. Critically regarded as one of the English playwright's major dramatic works, it features his characteristically economical dialogue, characters' hidden emotions and veiled motivations, and their self-absorbed competitive one-upmanship, face-saving, dishonesty, and (self-)deceptions.
The Room is Harold Pinter's first play, written and first produced in 1957. Considered by critics the earliest example of Pinter's "comedy of menace", this play has strong similarities to Pinter's second play, The Birthday Party, including features considered hallmarks of Pinter's early work and of the so-called Pinteresque: dialogue that is comically familiar and yet disturbingly unfamiliar, simultaneously or alternatingly both mundane and frightening; subtle yet contradictory and ambiguous characterizations; a comic yet menacing mood characteristic of mid-twentieth-century English tragicomedy; a plot featuring reversals and surprises that can be both funny and emotionally moving; and an unconventional ending that leaves at least some questions unresolved.
Michael Keith Billington is a British author and arts critic. He writes for The Guardian, and was the paper's chief drama critic from 1971 to 2019. Billington is "Britain's longest-serving theatre critic" and the author of biographical and critical studies relating to British theatre and the arts. He is the authorised biographer of the playwright Harold Pinter (1930–2008).
Tea Party is a play written by Harold Pinter, which Pinter adapted from his own 1963 short story of the same title. As a screenplay, it was commissioned by the European Broadcasting Union, directed by Charles Jarrott, and first transmitted on BBC Television in the programme The Largest Theatre in the World on 25 March 1965. It was first produced on stage in October 1968 as part of a double bill with Pinter's play The Basement.
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Bibliography for Harold Pinter is a list of selected published primary works, productions, secondary sources, and other resources related to English playwright Harold Pinter (1930–2008), the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, who was also a screenwriter, actor, director, poet, author, and political activist. It lists works by and works about him, and it serves as the Bibliography for the main article on Harold Pinter and for several articles relating to him and his works.
Harold Pinter and academia concerns academic recognition of and scholarship pertaining to Harold Pinter, CH, CBE (1930–2008), English playwright, screenwriter, actor, director, poet, author, political activist, and the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, at the time of his death considered by many "the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation."
Comedy of menace is the body of plays written by David Campton, Nigel Dennis, N. F. Simpson, and Harold Pinter. The term was coined by drama critic Irving Wardle, who borrowed it from the subtitle of Campton's play The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace, in reviewing Pinter's and Campton's plays in Encore in 1958.
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The Harold Pinter Theatre, known as the Comedy Theatre until 2011, is a West End theatre, and opened on Panton Street in the City of Westminster, on 15 October 1881, as the Royal Comedy Theatre. It was designed by Thomas Verity and built in just six months in painted (stucco) stone and brick. By 1884 it was known as simply the Comedy Theatre. In the mid-1950s the theatre underwent major reconstruction and re-opened in December 1955; the auditorium remains essentially that of 1881, with three tiers of horseshoe-shaped balconies.