Programme Cover

First produced at TheNational Theatre, Cottesloe, October 1982
(Collection of Three Plays)

For the other plays in this triple-bill please go to
Other Places
or to the individual plays:
A Kind of Alaska
Family Voices

Controller - Paul Rogers
Driver - Martin Jarvis

Directed by Peter Hall

Design and Lighting - John Bury
Stage Manager - John Caulfield
Staff Director - Kenneth Mackintosh
Production Manager - Jason Barnes



"The eminent author of The Caretaker and Betrayal writes so rarely for the stage these days that he would only have to squiggle a couple of lines of dialogue across a steamed-up bathroom window for the worldís theatrical scholars to roar in with fingerprint powder and glass-cutting equipment; and Other Places gives the burgeoning Pinter-industry rather more reason for excitement than that. True, one-third of the triple-bill mounted by Peter hall at the Cottesloe has been seen before, and, true, another third is not a lot more than an anecdote about a minicab controller first puzzled, then enraged, and finally converted to a sort of demented camaraderie by a driver who wonít move from Crystal Palace. Yet even Victoria Station, as this is called, could have been written by absolutely nobody else. Many sensed dramatic possibilities in those disembodied bleatings, drifting from sleazy shop-fronts in Canning Town to Cortinas in Fulham or Chiswick; but only Pinter could bring to such an exchange the interest in mutual manipulation, the banality yet strangeness of language, place and event, the unpindownable sense of unease, that leaves you wondering if you arenít actually hearing two sceptres playing out their last rituals in an empty, airless and conceivably post-devaluation London".
by Benedict Nightingale, The Spectator 22 October 1982