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Comedy of menace is the body of plays written by David Campton, Nigel Dennis, N. F. Simpson, and Harold Pinter. The term was coined by drama critic Irving Wardle , who borrowed it from the subtitle of Campton's play The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace , in reviewing Pinter's and Campton's plays in Encore in 1958.
Cast. Willoughby Gray as Petey; Beatrix Lehmann as Meg; Richard Pearson as Stanley; Wendy Hutchinson as Lulu; John Slater as Goldberg; John Stratton as McCann (The Birthday Party [Grove Press ed.] 8) Edinburgh. Edinburgh Gateway Company, directed by Victor Carin, 1962. New York City première
The Birthday Party, drama in three acts by Harold Pinter, produced in 1958 and published in 1959. Pinter’s first full-length play established his trademark “comedy of menace,” in which a character is suddenly threatened by the vague horrors at large in the outside world.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The original production featured the following cast: Bert Hudd - Claude Jenkins; Rose Hudd - Susan Engel; Mr. Kidd - Henry Woolf; Mr. Sands - David Davies; Mrs. Sands - Auriol Smith; Riley - George Odlum; The play was presented later at the Hampstead Theatre Club on 21 January 1960 as part of a double bill with The Dumb Waiter. It was directed ...
- May 1957
- University of Bristol, UK
- A room in a large house
- Harold Pinter
To utter the phrase comedy of menace is, for many, tantamount to saying Harold Pinter’s name. However, one of the several ways in which the conflation of Pinter’s name and comedy of menace can appear as ironic is that Pinter did not coin the phrase, nor was he the first playwright with whom it was associated.1 The phrase
Emerging in mid-20th century Britain, this genre is a style of comedy that uses humor to explore darker themes and evoke a sense of unease and discomfort. A play-on-words derived from the Restoration-era comedy of manners, the term comedy of menace was first used by British playwright David Campton in the title of his play T he Lunatic View: A ...
Dec 10, 2020 · Comedy of menace … Shane Zaza and Alec Newman in The Dumb Waiter. ... sharp one-act drama with a minimal cast that is especially conductive to social distancing, and which raises questions ...
