At seventeen, the possibility of a spectacular error of judgment is ever present. Even so, with hindsight, whoever thought that Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” was going to work as the sixth form house play at my all boys school? Of the six characters, two were women and three in their fifties or older - quite the challenge for a group of self-conscious lads. And the play’s overwhelming sense of threat and claustrophobia is hard to evoke when you played football with the cast at lunchtime and the action takes place where the morning’s assembly had been held. We walked Pinter’s tightrope of existential dread, knowing one false step would send us into a chasm of farce.

Still, maybe it could have worked, or at least worked better, had I not been chosen for the role of Stanley, the dishevelled and rather confused protagonist. It was my birthday party, and the culmination of the first act was when I received my present - a toy drum. It’s Pinter, no point asking why.

In front of the sixth form, teachers and parents (thankfully not my own), I slowly unwrapped the drum, removing the ribbon as meaningfully as I could muster, and hesitatingly hung it around my neck. A toy drum, with a narrow toy strap. In my adolescent mind, riddled with notions of method acting, dishevelled and confused had veered into moronic. From there, it seemed a natural progression to full-on psychotic. And so I began slowly circling the stage, banging the drum ever more forcefully until I stood, in the spotlight, right in front of the audience, furiously overacting; a man possessed, thrashing the toy drum, waiting for the spotlight to fall.

The spotlight lingered. The audience were enthralled.

And then at the height of the drama, reality intervened. The flimsy string around my neck broke, and the drum fell, with one bounce off the edge of the stage, into the bewildered audience.

“Oh…” I began as the lights dimmed, howling an expletive into the darkness. Disbelief was unsuspended in record time.

Pinter has a knack for creating uncomfortable situations. On that basis, I suppose my performance could be considered Pinteresque, a qualified success. Never to be repeated.