Michael Billington

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...

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...

Michael Billington in the Guardian expressed dislike for the production by Lorraine Pintal , which in making tyranny generic deleted the specific and topical references, but found the words austerely memorable and the play superbly...

This play outraged the critics, putting Kane on the news pages of tabloids as well as the arts pages of broadsheets.Paul Taylor in The Independent likened it to having your whole head held...

Michael Billington in 2005 called this his least favourite of Kane's plays. Yet he recognises its complexity. While he first saw it as a poetically allusive meditation on the obsessive nature of love, he later...

The reanimation of FB 's comedies is a happy story. Tara Ghoshal Wallace edited A Busy Day in paperback in 1984. A fringe production performed in Bristol in 1993, then in Islington, London, in...

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

Billington noted in April 2005 the staggering disparity of perception between the attitude to SK in England (where shehas not entered the theatrical mainstream, but is performed mostly at universities) and in the rest...

Nearly forty years on, critic Michael Billington wrote that Owners had announced the arrival of a major talent I signally failed to recognise.

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...

English-speaking critics are divided on the play's politics. Margaret Llewellyn-Jones thought it ideologically somewhat questionable in the way that it combines Brechtian distancing techniques with encouragement for the audience to cheer during the wrestling matches,...

The author said her play was a political event, not just a theatre event. She was proved right. The Court's artistic director said that an apolitical, escapist period in the theatre was ending: People really...

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.