Director
Harold Pinter
Performers
Barry Foster
Peter Howitt
Nicola Pagett
Cordelia Roche
Dorothy Tutin

Written and directed by Harold Pinter, one of the leading contemporary British playwrights, Party Time was first performed at London's Almeida Theatre in 1991.

This specially filmed television version brings together Pinter's original cast. Pinter also incorporated six new characters into his powerful one-act play for this recording.

The play centres on a ''power'' party in an elegant flat. The party is hosted by Barry Foster's suave Gavin. While his impeccably dressed guests discuss the latest exclusive health club and island retreats, people are being rounded up in the streets below. This brutal suppression in the outside world is only obliquely referred to by the party-goers, and yet the menace beneath the cultivated, soignée surface cannot be ignored, and sexual tyranny shadows political violence.

Under Pinter's direction - deliberate, stylised, muscularly tight, almost choreographed - the play seems to take shape like a series of formal dances. The dialogue is Pinter at his most staccato, but also lyrical.