Michael Billington

Some reviews (from Michael Billington , for instance) were favourable; others were stinkers, complaining of melodrama and missed opportunity. Since the critics' night followed the Evening Standard theatre awards (a notoriously boozy mid-day occasion),...

Reviewer Michael Billington thought highly of this exciting, provocative play, in which he discerned the same epic reach as in TW 's recent radio adaptation of War and Peace.

Beecham called the play a ferocious Geordie drama thick with dialect, diatribe and an unsparing depiction of the brutalities of the industrial north at the turn of the century. Its recent director, Jonathan Miller ...

Michael Billington wrote that Slovo's skillfully edited pieceasks the right questions in a way that is clear, gripping and necessary. He also wrote: It is fascinating. But is it theatre? He then answered his...

Michael Billington found this play richly informative and utterly compelling. But Nadia Latif and Omar El-Kairy (whose own play about the radicalisation of young British Muslims, Homegrown, was banned—unjustly, said Billington) questioned the objectivity...

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.

According to Michael Billington , this mesmerizing play . . . starts as a domestic inquisition and opens up to admit the horrors of twentieth-century history. It ends on a note of savage despair.