“The Birthday Party” by Harold Pinter

“The Birthday Party” by Harold Pinter

                                   

 

Born 10 October 1930 in East London, playwright, director, actor, poet and political activist. He died 24 December 2008.

                                                                                               

He wrote twenty-nine plays including The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal, twenty-one screenplays including The Servant, The Go-Between and The French Lieutenant's Woman, and directed twenty-seven theatre productions, including James Joyce's Exiles, David Mamet's Oleanna, seven plays by Simon Gray and many of his own plays including his latest, Celebration, paired with his first, The Room at The Almeida Theater, London in the spring of 2000.

He was awarded the Shakespeare Prize (Hamburg), the European Prize for Literature (Vienna), the Pirandello Prize (Palermo), the David Cohen British Literature Prize, the Laurence Olivier Award, the Legion d’Honneur and the Moliere D'Honneur for lifetime achievement. In 1999 he was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. He received honorary degrees from eighteen universities.

The Birthday Party:

                        The Birthday Party, Pinter’s first full-length play, opened in 1958 to terrible reviews at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. One performance reportedly played to exactly six people. Most critics found the play confusing, obscure, and unconvincing. The general theatergoing public,conditioned by the popular media, were equally dismissive, and the play closed after only a week. It seems that neither the public nor the critics were aesthetically or culturally prepared for Pinter’s style, accustomed as they were to the established genres of the day, which, aside from musicals, consisted of strict realism or drawing-room comedies—the one an act of forceful social engagement, the other a clever, farcical escapism.

                                     The play, in three acts, centers around Stanley Webber, a retired musician in his late thirties, who is living at a boardinghouse in a resort town on the coast of England. Apparently, he is hiding from some unspecified event in his past that has forced him into exile, isolated from the world outside the confines of his room. Living in the house with Stanley are the proprietors, Petey and Meg Boles, both in their sixties. Petey works at a beachside hotel, while Meg manages the house. Aside from an occasional visit from a young woman named Lulu, their lives are dull and ordinary, punctuated only by habit.

                            “The Birthday Party” is a play which falls under the category of absurd theater and comedy of menace. The play includes such features as the fluidity and ambiguity of time, place and identity and the disintegration of language. There are nearly six characters in the play.Petey Boles Chair attendant. Meg Boles -  Petey’s wife. Stanley Webber – A pianist.Lulu  Meg’s neighbor. Nat Goldberg – A Jew McCann – A stranger comes with Nat Goldberg.

 

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