The Birthday Party (Modern Plays)

In "The Birthday Party" sixtyish batty Meg and husband Petey live in a past-its-prime British seaside resort and run a seedy boarding house which has only one guest, a strange loner named Stanley whom Meg has grown too fond of. Two mysterious ill-boding strangers, Goldberg and McCann, show up and decide to give Stanley a birthday party when it isn't even his birthday. Lulu is a young neighbor who visits and regrets it. A toy drum becomes a disquieting prop. Pinter, child of Beckett, sets up a bizarre situation. All of the people are weird, kooky, save Petey, and their behavior becomes grotesque. The party goes badly awry and gets into scary territory. This is early Pinter, not top-drawer, in which he is groping his way toward the Pinteresque theater of the Absurd. He toned down his antics in some of his later, better works like "The Homecoming." A Pinter play frequently presents: 1. Round-the-bend, barely functional, often disreputable characters living on the fringes of society, some criminal types 2. Commonplace, prosaic dialogue that is often funny, satiric, inane and Absurdist 3. A sense of nameless terror and menace, pending violence, a mystery, the surreal, and the unexpected 4. Often the motivation of some characters is unclear. We see people who are barely able to make it. Are they dumb, out of it, or puppets on a string? Pinter keeps you interested by the plot. Where is he leading me? Why are these people doing these things? Nothing seems earthshaking You step into his askew world and you're asking for trouble, and if you're adventurous, you are enjoying being toyed with. Part of the charm of Pinter are his enigmatic plots. They're fun because he's going to tease you, to make you wonder. This is a clever play, funny, off-beat and Absurdist, but not really much else. He's showing off, proving that he can pull off a stunt, but does it take a master dramatist just to play games? In this 1958 play one can see touches of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Albee's 1962 classic. Pinter was extremely influential.

'The Birthday Party' was first presented by Michael Codron and David Hall at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, on 28 April 1958 with the following cast: Petey Willoughby Gray Meg Beatrix Lehmann Stanley Richard Pearson Lulu Wendy Hutchinson Goldberg John Slater McCann John Stratton. Stanley Webber is visited in his boarding house by two strangers, Goldberg and McCann. An innocent seeming birthday party for Stanley turns into a nightmare.