Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2003 Performance

This summer Iris Theatre is making the first of what will hopefully be many trips to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Join us at the beginning, to start the ball rolling. As our inaugural performance for the 2003 Fringe Festival we are pesenting two one act plays by Harold Pinter.

• Plays: Party Time and Mountain Language
• Author: Harold Pinter
• Venue: The Zoo , Kirk O'Field Parish Church, 140 The Pleasance, Edinburgh.
• Venue Box Office Number: (0131) 662 1222
• Iris Theatre Number: (07729) 205 567
• Dates and Prices:
  • August 4,5,6: - £7.00 (£5.00) [Two tickets for the price of one on 4th August]
  • August 7 - £7.50 (£5.50)
  • August 8,9,10 - £8.00 (£6.00)
• Running Time: 2:45pm -> 4:15pm

The first play is Party Time. This is a darkly comic look at the forces of oppression and control within society. The play opens and we find ourselves in the middle of a party. A very proper, very smart party. The kind of party that only the right people have been invited to. There seems to be something going on in the streets outside but we are not encouraged to worry about it. 'Just have another glass of wine and enjoy the atmosphere'. The couples bicker and threaten each other, the women simper to their men and tell them how very masculine and magnificent they are, and the men vie with each other to be more forthright in their distaste for the sloppiness and disorder they see in society.

All is reasonably normal, or as normal as anything is. We can laugh at the groteque stupidity of these people, their bone-headed and blinkered self certainty. However, there is a lingering sense of something wrong. A woman repeatedly asks what has happened to her brother Jimmy, but no-one wants to find the answer, least of all her brutal husband who viciously cuts down his wife's enquires. Over 50 minutes the play builds relentlessly, through the laughs, to a sudden, shocking and revelatory climax.

While not being blandly realistic Party Time illustrates the dark wish, lurking within us all, to impose, by force if necessary, our views onto others. We are looking at the man who says he knows what’s best for us. The man who thinks that the way he lives his life is right, and all other routes wrong. We are considering the president who places the interest of himself and his tribe over the civil rights of the population of whole countries, who kills in the name of Capital. There has never been a more pertinent time to stage this seriously funny play.

A line of women stand waiting outside a prison camp. They are waiting to see their husbands, their fathers, their sons. The snow falls, filling the world with an ice cold light. Standing for hours, they wait. Ignored, they wait. As the play opens a Sergeant and an Officer enter to speak to the women. An old woman has been bitten by a Doberman pinscher. They have been waiting all day in the biting cold. Their complaints are met with nonsensical replies, avoidance and outright sexual aggression.

These Mountain people are to be contained and controlled. These men they have come to visit are shithouses. They are enemies of the State.

Over the following three scenes we glimpse the treatment of the prisoners and their visitors. We see the violence and arbitrary viciousness of the machine of authority. These Mountain People are caught within forces much bigger than themselves. Victims of political necessity and the apathy of the rest of society, their fate is a dark one.

Over the 25 minutes running time, Mountain Language packs a punch few plays four times the length have.