Michael Billington

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...

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 ...

In April 2003 CC participated in a series of events at the Royal Court entitled War Correspondence. She composed her documentary piece Iraqdoc, out of actual remarks from a website chatroom frequented by...

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...

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.

Antonia Fraser called The Rooma savage, melancholy play which ends in appalling on stage physical violence. None of Pinter's other mature plays do this: he learned to keep the violence either offstage or in...

Michael Billington judged that this play felt like cramming a trunkload of ideas into a tiny case; that being too compressed for its own good made it less successful than the dazzlingLove and Information.

Trevor Nunn , director of Frozen, says that BL picks the most difficult subjects and faces them head-on, and finds that the writing is wonderfully spare and wonderfully poetic. In England Frozen won two...

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.

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...

Michael Billington found the final section reminiscent of Samuel Beckett. He wrote: While initially it seems slight, I find it's grown steadily in the mind since I saw it.

This play brought PG 's work to the attention of critics and playgoers alike. While reviews were generally quite positive, some had difficulty accepting the play's feminist perspective. For instance, Ted Whitehead in The Spectator...

Gems called her play uterine. It received mixed reviews. Michael Billington praised it as a dignified theatrical love letter, but other critics found it rambling and unfocused. Since 1977 it has seen several revivals.

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...