Michael Billington

Reviewer Michael Billington especially admired the vigour and irony of O'Brien's language.

Most reviewers preferred the first part. Michael Billington , reviewing for The Guardian, praised the play as less an anti-war diatribe than a feeling of the texture of ordinary lives.

LP was so moved that she wept as she wrote this play. She later perceived an autobiographical element in it. Reviewers were on the whole less impressed than they had previously been by Page...

In 2018 critic Michael Billington described the play as insightful, honest, and shocking. Its shock was topical: audiences gasped when a character told he can escape deportation by securing his citizenship for fifty pounds bitterly...

Michael Billington wrote that Wine in the Wilderness is about the moral value of personal truth, while Wateris about the commercial value of artistic lies.Kate Kellaway discerned in this play a rage over...

Michael Billington in the Guardian called the whole ensemble an engrossing evening and a potent reminder that theatre, among its myriad other functions, has a mission to inform.

A year or two into the new millennium HP began to get indigestion and to feel weak and exhausted. An endoscopy revealed oesophagal cancer. He planned for chemotherapy, then surgery. In February 2002 he learned...

In November, the next number of Poetry London (edited by Tambimuttu ) confessed in a footnote to having transposed, by printer's error, the concluding passages of these very interesting poems. It reprinted the first poem...

Michael Billington in his biography takes the first two poems seriously, as better than Pinter's poems of the previous year. He finds alliterative exuberance in the first and an undeniable haunting, crepuscular power in...

Michael Billington in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography wrote that Pinter here staked out his own particular theatrical territory, dark with the unexplained threat of violence. The room of the title, a bedsitter occupied...

In this play's three apparently naturalistic acts, a man named Stanley is tracked down in a seaside boarding-house by two strangers, the Jewish Goldberg and the Irish McCann. They turn up on his birthday and...

This play met with European as well as British success and was filmed in 1963. The excellent reviews, a complete reversal from the catastrophic ones for Pinter's previous London opening, are ascribed by Michael Billington

Bernard Levin called the play, in a revival of 1978, unendurable. In the ODNB a quarter-century later, Michael Billington called it a rich climax to Pinter's naturalistic writing for the theatre.

Nevertheless, reviews in the daily and Sunday papers were bad (including those of Bernard Levin and, more surprisingly, Michael Billington ).Benedict Nightingale in the New Statesman provided an appreciative notice and called...

Michael Billington suggested in the ODNB that Pinter's reputation and career might have developed differently had this play been seen by the public at the time of its completion.