Celebration and The Room

For a long time, Harold Pinter and comedy seemed to repel each other like two negatively charged magnets. That changed in 1999 when the revered playwright completed Celebration, which is now being presented as part of the Atlantic Theater Company’s double bill Celebration and The Room. Under Neil Pepe’s twinkling direction, this one-act emerges as one of the funniest plays now on the New York stage.

Calling to mind the first act of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, wherein the focus shifts among conversations at three restaurant tables, Celebration spotlights two conversations at what’s meant to be London’s poshest eatery. (The swank place is given an appropriately sleek, dark-wood look by set designer Walt Spangler.) The chief celebrants, at stage right, are Lambert (Patrick Breen) and Julie (Betsy Aidem), a pair of happy vulgarians observing their wedding anniversary; they’re joined by Lambert’s brother Matt (Thomas Jay Ryan) and Julie’s sister Prue (Carolyn McCormick), who happen to be married to each other and are as gladly louche as their siblings. At the other table sit the more soigné Russell (Brennan Brown) and his wife Suki (Kate Blumberg), a one-time secretary who chats merrily about the days when she dispensed sexual favors behind filing cabinets.

This sexy sextet is dressed by Ilona Somogyi to be as natty as the models in a Tatler layout; so are the establishment’s glad-handing proprietor, Richard (Philip Goodwin), and slinky hostess, Sonia (Christa Scott-Reed). The only apparently down-scale participant in the laugh-a-minute proceedings is the well-trained waiter (David Pittu).

The plot of the piece amounts to little: Suki spots Lambert and reminds him that they once had a fling, whereupon all the celebrants gather at one table. The fun here is in the spirited dialogue, which primarily centers on how crude the seemingly polished characters can be. An added fillip is the waiter, who knows his place but tries to rise above it by interjecting attenuated discourses on the people his well-connected grandfather knew. (He never gets through to his customers, though he nearly drives himself batty in the attempt.)

This being the work of the latest Nobel laureate, Celebration isn’t mindless. It’s not Pinter deliberately dumbing down in an attempt to be “commercial.” With the play’s vociferous arrivistes and with its title, the author is pressing a point; what’s being celebrated is the strong inheriting the earth. Yes, it’s possible to think that Pinter is looking down his nose at these lads and ladies. (Lambert and Matt come across as his gloss on the crime-loving Kray twins, Reginald and Ronnie.) But he’s also accepting the only somewhat muted rowdies, acknowledging that they’ve earned the right to England’s luxuries if only by boldly appropriating them. The barbarians have breached the gates and are winning. In contrast, the socially lower-ranked waiter has lost his foothold. Never mind his harking back in rambling patter to Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Faulkner,and Hemingway; these names mean less than nothing to the people he’s addressing.

Celebration is also startling because it’s devoid of so much that’s normally considered “Pinteresque.” Gone without a trace are the expected pauses and extended silences that Pinter traditionally builds into his scripts. Almost undetectable here are the usual hints of physical and/or psychological menace. At one moment, Lambert and Matt seem to object of Russell’s offhand manner towards Suki, but nothing comes of it; it’s merely the sort of laddish behavior that, at other moments, switches to a strain of appealing street gallantry.

In this production, Celebration is all the more intriguing for being paired with his first play, The Room (1957), set in a dingy flat where non-stop gabber Rose Hudd (Mary Beth Peil, struggling with a lower-class accent) and her silent hubby Bert (Ryan again, quietly seething this time) hunker down. Their landlord, Mr. Kidd (Peter Maloney), drops in occasionally. On the evening in question, they are also visited by two obstreperous dwelling hunters (Blumberg and Pittu) and a blind stranger (Earle Hyman) who seems to represent something that terrifies Rose. His presence results in some brutish action by Bert.

Since Pinter is quite ill at the moment, these two one-acts may indeed mark the beginning and end of his important oeuvre. The Room feels like a tentative step forward from the 1950s kitchen-sink dramas with which John Osborne and Arnold Wesker were shaking up the English stage, and it’s clearly the work of a young man who had yet to discard those influences. Conversely, Celebration is the product of an artist who’s found his style and consequently become a significant influence himself, a man who has broken through to a new plane. If The Room is best appreciated as the beginning of a lecture on Pinter’s development as a first-rank playwright, Celebration is valuable as that lecture’s summation and, on its own merits, as a cause for celebration.