The Birthday Party is the first full-length play by Harold Pinter, first performed in 1958 and first published in 1959. It is one of Pinter's best-known and most frequently performed plays.
In the setting of a rundown seaside boarding house, a little birthday party is turned into a nightmare when two sinister strangers arrive unexpectedly. The play has been classified as a comedy of menace, characterised by Pinteresque elements such as ambiguous identity, confusions of time and place, and dark political symbolism.
Pinter began writing The Birthday Party in the summer of 1957 while touring in Doctor in the House. He later said: "I remember writing the big interrogation scene in a dressing room in Leicester."
Characters Petey, a man in his sixties Meg, a woman in her sixties Stanley, a man in his late thirties Lulu, a girl in her early twenties Goldberg, a man in his fifties McCann, a man of thirty
Summary The Birthday Party is about Stanley Webber, an erstwhile piano player who lives in a rundown boarding house run by Meg and Petey Boles, in an English seaside town, "probably on the south coast, not too far from London".Harold Pinter, Faber Critical Guides (London: Faber and Faber, 2000) 57: The setting evokes "Basingstoke and Maidenhead, southern towns ... and ... London – in both Goldberg and Stanley's reminiscences."Audio interview with Harold Pinter, conducted by Rebecca Jones, BBC Radio 4, bbc.co.uk/today, 12 May 2008, World Wide Web, 14 May 2008. Two sinister strangers, Goldberg and McCann, arrive looking for him, supposedly on his birthday, and turn his apparently innocuous birthday party organised by Meg into a nightmare.The Birthday Party synopsis, in Samuel French Basic Catalog, rpt. in samuelfrench.com ("Little Theatre"), n.d., World Wide Web, 10 May 2008.
Plot
Act 1 While Meg prepares to serve her husband, Petey, breakfast, Stanley, described as a man "in his late thirties", who is dishevelled and unshaven, enters from upstairs. Alternating between maternal and flirtatious affectation toward Stanley, Meg tells him that "two gentlemen", two new "visitors", will be arriving; Stanley appears concerned and suspicious at this information.
At "[a] sudden knock on the front door", Meg goes offstage while Stanley "listens" at a voice coming "through the letter box", but it is just Lulu carrying in a package delivered for Meg. Right after Meg and Lulu exit, Goldberg and McCann arrive, but Stanley immediately "sidles through the kitchen door and out of the back door" to eavesdrop, but they speak only vaguely about "this job" they must do with bureaucratic clichés, nevertheless rendering McCann "satisfied".
After Meg's new "guests" go up to their room, Stanley enters and Meg gives him the package brought by Lulu containing his birthday present. He opens it to reveal a toy drum.
Act 2 Stanley encounters McCann and the two talk. McCann is determined to stop Stanley from leaving the house. Stanley's behaviour and speech start to become erratic. He denies the fact that it is his birthday, insists that Meg is mad for saying so, and asks McCann if Goldberg told him why he has been brought to the house. Goldberg enters and sends McCann out to collect some whiskey that he has ordered for the party. When McCann returns, he and Goldberg interrogate Stanley with a series of ambiguous, rhetorical questions, tormenting him to complete collapse. Meg then enters in her party dress, and the party proceeds with a series of toasts in Stanley's honor. Lulu then arrives and engages with Goldberg in romance. The party culminates with a game of blind man's buff, during which McCann further taunts Stanley by breaking his glasses and trapping his foot in the toy drum. Stanley then attacks Meg and, in the blackout that immediately follows, attacks and attempts to rape Lulu. The act ends with Goldberg and McCann backing the maniacally laughing Stanley against a wall. McCann and Goldberg try to torture and hurt Stanley always.
Act 3 Paralleling the first scene of the play, Petey is having breakfast, and Meg asks him innocuous questions, with important differences revealing the aftermath of the party. After Meg leaves to do some shopping, Petey begins to express concern to Goldberg about Stanley's condition and Goldberg's intention to take him to an unseen character called Monty. There then follows an exchange between Goldberg and McCann during which Goldberg's usual confident style temporarily abandons him, though he seems to recover after asking McCann to blow in his mouth. Lulu then confronts Goldberg about the way he was the previous night (during unseen events that occurred after the party) but is driven from the house by McCann making unsavoury comments about her character and demanding that she confess her sins to him.
McCann then brings in Stanley, with his broken glasses, and he and Goldberg bombard him with a list of his faults and of all the benefits he will obtain by submitting to their influence. When asked for his opinion of what he has to gain, Stanley is unable to answer. They begin to lead him out of the house toward the car waiting to take him to Monty.
Petey confronts them one last time but passively backs down as they take Stanley away, "broken", calling out "Stan, don't let them tell you what to do!" After Meg returns from shopping, she notices that "The car's gone" and as Petey remains silent, he continues to withhold his knowledge of Stanley's departure, allowing her to end the play without knowing the truth about Stanley.
Genre The Birthday Party has been described (some say "pigeonholed") by Irving Wardle and later critics as a "comedy of menace"As cited by Susan Hollis Merritt, Pinter in Play: Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter (1990; Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995) 5, 9, 225–28, 326. and by Martin Esslin as an example of the Theatre of the Absurd.Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 3rd ed., with a new foreword by the author (1961; New York: Vintage [Knopf], 2004). (13). It includes such features as the fluidity and ambiguity of time, place, and identity and the disintegration of language.For a discussion of "Pinter's 'ambiguity' ", see "Pinter's 'Semantic Uncertainty' and Critically 'Inescapable' Certainties", chapter 4 of Merritt, Pinter in Play 66–86.
Reception Produced by Michael Codron and David Hall, the play had its world première at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge, England on 28 April 1958, where the play was "warmly received". On its pre-London tour in Oxford and Wolverhampton, it met with a "positive reception" as "the most enthralling experience the Grand Theatre has given us in many months."Qtd. in Jamie Andrews, "It Was Fifty Years Ago Today (Almost)" , Harold Pinter Archive Blog, British Library, 12 May 2008, World Wide Web, 20 May 2008; Andrews is citing a contemporaneous review from May 1958 and context from a letter by Sean Day-Lewis, former drama critic of the Express and Star and the Birmingham Evening Post, published in May 2008. Cf. Sean Day-Lewis, "Birthday Party Bafflement", Guardian, Letters, Guardian Media Group, 20 May 2008, World Wide Web, 20 May 2008.
On 19 May 1958, the production had its London début at the Lyric Opera House, Hammersmith (now the Lyric Hammersmith)."About the Lyric: History" , Lyric Hammersmith, n.d., Web, 9 May 2008. It was a commercial and, mostly, a critical failure, instigating "bewildered hysteria" and closing after only eight performances. The weekend after it had already closed, Harold Hobson's belated rave review, "The Screw Turns Again", appeared in The Sunday Times,Harold Hobson, "The Screw Turns Again", The Sunday Times 25 May 1958: 11, rpt. in "The Birthday Party – Premiere" , haroldpinter.org, Harold Pinter, 2000–2003, World Wide Web, 15 May 2008. rescuing its critical reputation and enabling it to become one of the classics of the modern stage."The Birthday Party", Socialist Worker, Socialist Worker, 10 May 2008, World Wide Web, 9 May 2008: "[The Birthday Party] centres around Stanley Webber, a mysterious man who claims to be a piano player..He is visited in the boarding house he now lives in by two sinister characters, Goldberg and McCann, who are looking for a "certain person"...A birthday party for Stanley turns into a terrible experience...The play received poor reviews when it first opened, but today The Birthday Party is rightly recognised as a classic."
From 8 to 24 May 2008, the Lyric celebrated the play's 50th anniversary with a revival, directed by David Farr, as well as related events. They included a gala performance and reception, hosted by Harold Pinter, on 19 May 2008, exactly fifty years after its London première.The Birthday Party , Lyric Hammersmith, 8–24 May 2008, World Wide Web, 9 May 2008.
Interpretation Like many of Pinter's other plays, very little of the expository information in The Birthday Party is verifiable; it is contradicted by the characters and otherwise ambiguous, and, therefore, one cannot take what they say at face value. For example, in Act One, Stanley describes his career, saying "I've played the piano all over the world", reduces that immediately to "All over the country", and then, after a pause, undercuts both statements by saying "I once gave a concert."Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party, in The Essential Pinter (New York: Grove P, 2006) 14. (Subsequent parenthetical page references to this edition appear in the text.)
While the title and the dialogue refer to Meg's planning a party to celebrate Stanley's birthday: "It's your birthday, Stan. I was going to keep it a secret until tonight", even that fact is dubious, as Stanley denies that it is his birthday: "This isn't my birthday, Meg" (48), telling Goldberg and McCann: "Anyway, this isn't my birthday...No, it's not until next month", adding, in response to McCann's saying "Not according to the lady [Meg]", "Her? She's crazy. Round the bend" (53).
Although Meg claims that her house is a boarding house, her husband Petey, who was confronted by two men who "wanted to know if we could put them up for a couple of nights" is surprised that Meg already has prepared a room (23) and Stanley (being the only supposed boarder) also responds to what appears to him to be the sudden appearance of Goldberg and McCann as prospective guests on a supposed short holiday, flat out denies that it is a boarding house: "This is a ridiculous house to pick on...Because it's not a boarding house. It never was." (53)
McCann claims to have no knowledge of Stanley or Maidenhead when Stanley asks him "Ever been anywhere near Maidenhead?...There's a Fuller's teashop. I used to have my tea there...and a Boots Library. I seem to connect you with the High Street...A charming town, don't you think?...A quiet, thriving community. I was born and brought up there. I lived well away from the main road" (51); yet Goldberg later names both businesses that Stanley used to frequent connecting Goldberg and possibly also McCann to Maidenhead: "A little Austin, tea in Fuller's a library book from Boots, and I'm satisfied" (70). Of course, both Stanley and Goldberg could just be inventing these apparent reminiscences as they both appear to have invented other details about their lives earlier, and here Goldberg could conveniently be lifting details from Stanley's earlier own mention of them, which he has heard; as Merritt observes, the factual basis for such apparent correspondences in the dialogue uttered by Pinter's characters remains ambiguous and subject to multiple interpretations.John Russell Brown, "Words and Silence" (1972), rpt. in 87–99 of Casebook, ed. Scott. (Subsequent parenthetical page references to Brown appear in the text.)