''Celebration', a one-act play, focuses on two groups of diners at an expensive and trendy restaurant following a night at the theatre. At one table, an anniversary celebration is taking place. The men, who are brothers are also married to sisters, and have shadowy backgrounds, calling themselves 'strategy consultants.' At another table are a banker and his ditzy trophy wife.  Floating between these tables are the restaurant's hosts and a chatty waiter who name drops continually.

As the New York Times reviewer stated: "Nothing really happens in 'Celebration,' even by Pinter standards. It's basically all talk, exchanges of insults, skewed platitudes and highly suspect memories described with placid certainty. The subjects, on some level, are almost invariably sex and power. And yet it all packs the tickling wallop of perfectly orchestrated slapstick."

Celebration is an acerbic portrait of a sated culture choking on its own material success. Startling, full of black humor and wicked satire, Celebration displays a vivid zest for life.

The funniest, feistiest piece Pinter has written in years...What Pinter reveals, with a good deal of satirical verve, is the coarse swagger and loutish insensitivity of these walking wallets and their spouses. But Pinter's plow is much more than an obvious attack on the nerdy nouveau riche....here the diners use the restaurant as a retreat from the outside world....And, as always in Pinter, there is no such thing as a harmless sanctuary: here the threat to an evening of crude conviviality comes from an intrusive waiter...Behind the play's wild comedy lurks something strange and incalculable which is beautifully caught in Pinter's fast-moving production. (Michael Billington for the Guardian)

Celebration is certainly his funniest and also perhaps his most accessible script in many years. It is set in an amazingly familiar West End restaurant, where he has even managed to cast a lookalike for the tall, urbane real-life manager; at two separate tables...sit a cross-section of recognisable Pinter types. At the smaller table are a couple...taunting each other with past and present infidelities; at the larger, two Mafioso thugs and their blowsy, aging trophy-wives are celebrating a wedding anniversary. But, as usual with Pinter, there is a good deal going on just under the tablecloths; neither group is really in any mood for celebration, and as the wine loosens their tongues some extremely unpleasant truths start to crawl out from the past. Meanwhile, the unctuous manager, his female assistant and a young waiter with extraordinary false-memory fantasies start to assert themselves as something more than restaurant staff, and at the end of the evening it is the young waiter...left alone on stage to confront his own demons, who has not only the last words but also the most immediate claim to our ultimate attention....both these plays are about some of the same things—sexual jealousy, nameless tenors, violent men and women who have only their sex to define them. But where The Room is frequently vicious, Celebration is something still more dangerous; the only visible knives here may be the ones on the elegantly laid tables, but people are also getting laid and knifed, only this time with a smile. It is the smile of the killer monsters and mobsters, but the shark still has shiny teeth, dear, and Pinter shows them pearly white. (Sheridan Morley for the Spectator)

2005

(standing l to r) Michael Gambon, Janie Dee, Stephen Rea, Joanna Lumley, Charles Dance, and  Jeremy Irons. (seated) Sinéad Cusack, Kenneth Cranham and Penelope Wilton

To celebrate Harold Pinter's 75th birthday and his Nobel Prize for Literature, the Gate Theatre in Dublin mounted a tribute to the playwright in October 2005. Part of that program, a staged reading of "Celebration" by a steller cast (Stephen Brennan, Sinéad Cusack, Janie Dee, Donna Dent, Michael Gambon, Jeremy Irons, Derek Jacobi, Stephen Rea and Penelope Wilton), was repeated in London’s West End. As with the Dublin program, many of the actors were veterans of Pinter’s works. The playwright himself, “had a helping hand” in picking out the Albery cast (shown at left), although he did not direct it this time. As the Telegraph advertised, “for three nights only this week, there is the chance to see history being repeated.” "With no distractions of props or furniture, the audience can just listen to the words of the play," says Michael Colgan, the artistic director of the Gate Theatre, Dublin, and the event's organiser. "Most of the actors have previously been in Pinter's plays. These people are grateful to him and also fond of him."

From the Guardian:

All the action takes place in a swish London restaurant where two coarse-grained strategy consultants are dining with their respective wives. At an adjacent table a banker and his wife banter over his recently discovered affair. But while Pinter gets a lot of laughs out of these gold-plated philistines, he also suggests they are displaced people. Shorn of any inherited values, they live in an eternal present of sex, food and conspicuous consumption.

But what lifts this 50-minute piece into another realm is the intrusive presence of a Waiter played with looming intensity by Stephen Rea. If the diners have no cultural roots, he seems afflicted by an excess of them as he reminisces about a grandad who apparently knew everyone from WB Yeats to the Beverley Sisters.

But for all his buttonholing eccentricity, the Waiter has access to a world of family and feeling denied to the grandstanding diners.

Dangerous, however, to get too solemn about a piece that reminds us Pinter has always been a comic writer. And Alan Stanford's neatly organised production rides along on a wave of laughter.

Michael Gambon is outrageous as a bullish peace enforcer who can scarcely say a civil word to Penelope Wilton as his sardonically subversive wife. Janie Dee also raises the temperature several notches as she taunts Jeremy Irons' faithless husband with memories of her own "saucy, flirty, giggly" younger self. And Charles Dance and Joanna Lumley preside over the clientele as if they were running an upmarket therapy centre. Two more chances only to catch a play that reminds us that Pinter has always been one of the great piss-takers.

The Telegraph:

Staged readings tend not to make huge inroads at the box office. But then they tend not to boast a cast as mouthwatering as the veritable thespocracy which will muster, scripts in hand, on Thursday. It consists of six Pinter veterans in Michael Gambon, Penelope Wilton, Jeremy Irons, Stephen Rea, Janie Dee and Kenneth Cranham, and three Pinter virgins in Sinéad Cusack, Charles Dance and Joanna Lumley.

Most of the above gathered in Dublin last month for a weekend's reading of plays, prose and poetry organised by the Gate Theatre. Even one of their own number was agog at the array of talent around him. "When I saw them on the stage," says Stephen Rea, who was in the original cast of Ashes to Ashes, "I said, 'Even Mourinho couldn't buy this lot.'" [...]

Celebration had its first performances at the Almeida in 2000, in a double bill with Pinter's first play, The Room, written 43 years earlier. Set in a swanky London restaurant, it features two tables. At one table are two rather spivvy brothers (played, in the staged reading, by Gambon and Cranham), and their wives (Wilton and Cusack), who are sisters. At the other table someone big in the City is wining and dining his dolly bird (Irons and Dee). Interruptions come from a lugubrious maître d' (Dance), a waitress (Lumley) and a waiter brimming with preposterous anecdotes about the famous people his grandfather knew (Rea).

I have an uncomfortable memory of this paper's theatre critic, Charles Spencer, deriding the gales of laughter with which Celebration was greeted on its première as "sycophantic" - uncomfortable because I was sitting next to him, and laughing.

Pinter's later work had become increasingly gnomic and politicised, and here in his 70th year he suddenly came up with what appeared to be an out-and-out comedy, boisterous, even crude in places, with only a light dusting of his trademark menace (the brothers are "security consultants").
    
"Harold is a very funny writer and people are a bit holier than thou about him," says Penelope Wilton, the star of Landscape, Betrayal and A Kind of Alaska. In this play, she says, "he has a way with language where he is able to make swear words have their value back, and don't tell me how he does it but it is very funny."

There was more laughter at the reading in Dublin, some of it from the stage. "When you do a reading and haven't done much rehearsal," explains Rea, "a lot of it feels new to you and you're not protected. You were very open to the play but also it made you corpse."

"I couldn't stop," admits Gambon, who has been in Betrayal, The Caretaker and Mountain Language. "I had to hold on tight. Several of us were on the edge of going. It's not like the other ones I've been in. All his plays have a surface of a thousandth of an inch and a subtext of two miles. That's why actors love them. I think he just sat down and wrote a simple play."

When Pinter wrote Betrayal, a portrait of his long affair with Joan Bakewell, Gambon found himself more or less playing the playwright himself in the original stage production. Getting the nod for the role must count as the ultimate compliment from Pinter. Jeremy Irons, who has previously been in The Caretaker on stage and The French Lieutenant's Woman (scripted by Pinter) on screen, has a theory about why he was cast in the film of Betrayal. "Harold always said he liked the fact that I didn't care about making the characters likeable."

However seasoned this company, the reverence they feel for the playwright is palpable. "A request to appear in something of Harold's is really a summons from a very great height," says Rea, "and I know all actors feel that."

But why? The consensus seems to be that he started his career as an actor, has ended it as a poet, and that the genius of the playwright lies somewhere in the overlap. "It's all about language," says Wilton. "In the theatre you live and die by the word and Harold just writes superbly."

"He's not like any other playwright. There's no looseness in his plays," says Gambon. "Every full stop and comma counts."

Irons discovered this, almost literally to his cost, when he had finished a take in the opening pub scene of Betrayal. "He said, 'You said "but" instead of an "and".' We put money on it and fortunately I was right."

Despite the corpsing, the evidence from the Gate Theatre is promising. "All the actors were very very nervous," says Rea, "but the atmosphere had an incredible electricity and energy. Everyone was on some kind of high doing it. At the end Harold walked on and shook hands with each of us. It was wonderful. Everybody felt a sense of history in doing it."

For three nights only this week, there is the chance to see history being repeated.