The Radio TImes listing

First performed on the BBC Third Programme 1 March 1960 and was televised by ABC Armchair Theatre on 24 April 1960
see Acting for TV


Albert Stokes - Barry Foster
Mrs Stokes - Mary O'Farrell
Seeley - Harold Pinter
Kedge - John Rye
Barman - Walter Hall
Old Man - Norman Wynne
Mr King - David Bird
Mr Ryan - Norman Wynne
Gidney - Nicholas Selby
Joyce - Jane Jordan Rogers
Eileen - Margaret Hotine
Horne - Hugh Dickson
Barrow - David Spenser
The Girl - Vivien Merchant

Produced by Donald McWhinnie

Radio Review
Robert Robinson
When you say a playwright has a good ear for the banalities of ordinary speech you donít after allí say very much. But if you can go further and say that the reason he has the good ear is because he comprehends the sources of the banality, then you praise him highly.
The contours of talk in Harold Pinterís A Night Out (Third) were beautifully reproduced because the hand of the playwright was at he same time feeling out the motives at a very deep level indeed. It was not only the sound of the office bully at the party, the cannibal mum on the domestic hearth, the genteel whore in the street at night ñ it was not only the sound that Mr. Pinter provided, it was the reason for the sound: not explicit reason, not reason that shoved into the mouths of characters or dumped down in the path of action so that everyone has to climb over it before things can proceed, nut reason that is implicit in the spring and flow of a play itself.
So that at the end you knew ñ though you had not been told ñ that for the people in this play, as for people outside it, the Inferiority Feeling is a very powerful dynamic indeed. In a splendid cast, Mr. Barry Foster as Albert, who is well nigh suffocated by his monologuing mother, was brilliant: his neurotic hesitancies owed nothing to theatricality, he had discovered them for himself. But it is Mr. Pinterís ear that we must chiefly celebrate: it is a splendid ear, and he keeps it to the ground.
The Sunday Times, 1960