By Phil Concannon
Harold Pinter wrote The Hothouse in 1958. He then discarded the play and it remained out of sight for over two decades, before Pinter himself directed its premiere at the Hampstead Theatre in 1980. “I have occasionally out of irritation thought about writing a play with a satirical point. I once did, actually, a play that no-one knows about. A full-length play written after The Caretaker,” he told an interviewer in the early ’70s. “Wrote the whole damn thing in three drafts. It was called The Hothouse and was about an institution in which patients were kept: all that was presented was the hierarchy, the people who ran the institution. One never knew what happened to the patients or what they were there for or who they were. It was heavily satirical and it was quite useless.”
Despite Pinter’s protestations about its substandard quality, The Hothouse was a success in its initial run and was acclaimed again when it was revived in 2007. Now the play is back in London, with Jamie Lloyd directing a new production at the Trafalgar Theatre, and it gives audiences another valuable opportunity to catch up with this still underrepresented work. What might take some viewers by surprise is how broadly comic much of The Hothouse is, perhaps being partly inspired by some of the revue sketches he was writing around that time. In fact, the opening scene of the play unfolds in the manner of a classic sitcom.
MostlyFilm 