Jane Stanton Hitchcock and Harold Pinter: The Case of Vanilla

ABSTRACT One of the vaguest moments in Harold Pinter’s career is his direction of Vanilla, a play authored by Jane Stanton Hitchcock that toured in Britain in the summer of 1990 but failed to seduce both critics and audiences. The production’s critical failure and the fact that the playscript remains unpublished have contributed to the fact that Vanilla has never been the subject of a study of Pinter and is rarely mentioned in the scholarship. This article is a first effort to engage properly with Vanilla, both the production and the play. Drawing on an interview and correspondence with Stanton Hitchcock, her production diary, the unpublished playscript, performance reviews, Pinter scholarship, and Pinter’s own plays and other writing, this article provides a brief history of Stanton Hitchcock’s career as an artist and a reading of Vanilla, which accounts for select moments in Pinter’s own work, namely Party Time (1991), to argue that Vanilla influenced some of Pinter’s original writing in the wake of his direction of Stanton Hitchcock’s play.