Michael Billington

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.

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...

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 ...

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.