Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart lead the cast in this glorious revival of Harold Pinter’s comic classic.
One summer’s evening, two ageing writers, Hirst and Spooner, meet in a Hampstead pub and continue their drinking into the night at Hirst’s stately house nearby. As the pair become increasingly inebriated, and their stories increasingly unbelievable, the lively conversations turns into a revealing power game, further complicated by the return home of two sinister younger men.
Two of the greatest actors ever born in one of the greatest plays ever written.
Time Out
Also starring Owen Teale and Damien Molony, don’t miss this glorious revival of Pinter’s comic classic.
Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are unmissable.
Daily Telegraph
Hirst is an alcoholic upper-class litterateur who lives in a grand house presumed to be in Hampstead, with Foster and Briggs, respectively his purported amanuensis and man servant (or apparent bodyguard), who may be lovers. Spooner, a “failed, down-at-heel poet” whom Hirst has “picked up in a Hampstead pub” and invited home for a drink, becomes Hirst’s house guest for the night; claiming to be a fellow poet, through a contest of at least-partly fantastic reminiscences, he appears to have known Hirst at university and to have shared male and female acquaintances and relationships. The four characters are named after cricket players. It has been suggested that Spooner was originally inspired by the poet Eddie Linden, whom Pinter knew.