The New World Order
Four short plays: One for the Road, The New World Order,
Precisely, Mountain Language, Dialogue for Three 		  Definitions of theatre (in 2007) also continued to expand... I yearn for an alliance between formal experiment and rich content. Three examples pointed the way...  Ellie Jones's conflation of Pinter's short political pieces, A New World Order, took us on an extraordinary journey into the murky depths of Brighton Town Hall.

Michael Billington, December 2007
The Guardian Pick of the Year
By Harold Pinter
Directed by Ellie Jones 		With Kate Dyson, Beth Fitzgerald,
 Gabriel Floyd, Sam Gledhill, Richard Hahlo, Hugh Ross, Dominick Rickhards,
 Ross Sutherland, and Jem Wall		  
Brighton Festival May 2007
Brighton Town Hall Old Prison Cells 		 
Set and Costume Design by Ellen Cairns
Sound Design by Thor McIntyre-Burnie
Lighting Design by Clare O'Donoghue
 Production Manager: Mark Shayle
Stage Manager: Esther Armstrong
Stewards Co-ordinator: Siou Hannam 		 
Stewards: Natasha Newington, Adrian Spring, Giselle Schiniou, Mat Beaumont, Martin Kelly, Maria Pullen, Andy Small, Andrea Folyon, Gina Martin, Alex Beales

Chaperone: Lucie Fitchett
  Brighton Festival production:
Jane McMorrow, Matt Lyndon Jones, Philip Morgan, Tanya Ashdown

Co-producers for Hydrocracker:
 Richard Hahlo and Jem Wall 		 

The New World Order from ArtsAgenda on Vimeo.
(Warning: contains strong language)

  
The plays were staged not in a theatre but in a ‘found space’ - The old police cells underneath The Town Hall and parts of The Town Hall itself. The audience had a visceral experience of imprisonment and literally went on a journey through the space. At various points they ‘witnessed’ different plays in different rooms and some of the shorter sketches happened in corridors moving between the different locations.

Hydrocracker is planning a new production of the show for London and Oxford in 2011.
A brilliant collage of Pinter's political plays that takes the audience on a journey into the maze-like prison beneath the city's town hall...

"The collection of Pinter plays, superbly directed by Ellie Jones for Hydrocracker, is both disturbing and timely. Like the Belarus Free Theatre, which recently appeared in Leeds, Jones skilfully interweaves Pinter's plays about political oppression.

"The result is far more than a tourist's-eye view of torture. In the final scene from One for the Road, we notice that Ross's state agent is scanning a British daily. And, out on the street, we are handed a fact sheet about Omar Deghayes: a Brighton law graduate who was arrested in Pakistan and who is now detained in Guantánamo Bay. An unnerving coda to a shattering experience that brings Pinter's world directly home."

Michael Billington, The Guardian 		  "Whatever you think of One for the Road, Mountain Language, Precisely, Press Conference and The New World Order – and recent events have left me thinking them horribly apt – they gain from being cut into each other and presented in a walkabout that begins in a posh council chamber and ends in the building’s sinister catacombs.

 "Grandees blithely debate mass murder while guard dogs savage old women, sadists hover over hooded men and a whisky-swilling minister sneers at a broken husband and wife. Topical? Surely so."

Benedict Nightingale, The Times
"Site-specific theatre used to often mean devised theatre, stronger on the visual and physical rather than the text. But traditional texts are increasingly being used by companies in found spaces and venues. And so it is that an enterprising company called Hydrocracker has secured the rights to stage several of Harold Pinter's miniature pieces, including One For The Road, Precisely and The New World Order, in corridors and the council chamber of Brighton Town Hall."

The Guardian		   "Indoors it was a different, far more impressive story. One of the festival’s main in-house offerings is a lavish site-specific rendering of a batch of short political plays by Harold Pinter – grouped under the collective title of The New World Order.

"This embarrassment of tyrannies absolutely lays Pinter open to the charge of being heavy-handed and repetitive in his later writing, but rather than lessening their impact, the evening renews one’s admiration for his consistency of outrage.
 
"The voices we hear are English, the insinuation is clear: unspeakable things are done in our name, and if we don’t speak out, they could also end up happening here, under our noses.

Dominick Cavendish, Daily Telegraph