CELEBRATION by Harold Pinter

September 7-8, 2018

Studio 3:11, LX Factory, Lisboa

Lambert Daniel Cotterall

Matt Dave Earl

Prue Pat Butler

Julie Cátia Delgado

Russell Miguel Pereira

Suki Margarida Figueiredo

Ricardo Jorge Soares

Sonia Jojo Hui

Waiter Fouad Nouar

Directed by Dan Cotterall and Suresh Nampuri

Video & Photo Sara Romero, Rui Pedro

Production assistant Aleksa Khodorovska

CELEBRATION (2000) is set in a swanky London restaurant, catering to the well-heeled, at the turn of the millennium.

At one table sit sisters Julie and Prue and their husbands, brothers Lambert and Matt; they are celebrating Lambert and Julie’s wedding anniversary. These people are obviously wealthy, but we don’t know how they acquired their wealth. Lambert and Matt, vaguely thuggish characters with East London accents, claim to be strategy consultants. At another table are the insecure and emasculated banker Russell and his wife Suki, an unapologetic chancer, if ever there was one.

Power and sex are key themes in Pinter. These diners are shallow non-persons, moneyed but unscrupulous. They patronize a restaurant whose purpose is to indulge their vainglorious needs… an all-purpose brothel for the morally vacuous. Their hollowness shows in the almost total lack of warmth between the diners. If there is one thing that the clientele of this restaurant share, it’s disdain… expressed in venomous sharp-tongued barbs.

Cutting through this poisonous swathe are Ricardo, the elegant owner of the restaurant, bright and brittle Sonia, and an introspective, troubled waiter, who occasionally interrupts the action to launch into fantastic and at times absurd reminiscences about his grandfather.

Coarse, funny and brutal, Celebration is an acid bath that luxuriously flays the skin off its characters.