Playing for Pinter
From Mr Sheridan Morley Sir: I'm not convinced that your regular critics should usurp readers' space here by bickering among themselves, but in honour of Pinter's 70th birthday I'd like to footnote something your admirable radio critic Michael Vestey (Arts, 21 October) wrote about a radio production of a revue sketch called Last to Go.
Basically, Vestey doesn't care for it, and that's his right; but it may just have been the way it was done, albeit by Pinter himself and Geoffrey Bayldon. Both are, in the legit sense, actors; I had the joy of directing the sketch earlier this year at the Jermyn Street Theatre with two eccentrics, Jonathan Cecil (another critic of yours) and Frank Thornton. Not only did audiences fall about, but I had the still greater joy of watching Pinter himself fall about, not a thing you often get to see in a theatre.
Last to Go is a revue sketch, and it needs to be played not by actors but by revue per- formers, of whom there are, alas, almost none left. It really is that simple, and Last to Go really is that hilarious. And sinister. And dramatic. And it has just about every- thing we subsequently came to call Pin- teresque, in under ten minutes. If that's an eternity, I'd like more of it.
Sheridan Morley
London SW11
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