THE BIRTHDAY
PARTY
-Harold Pinter
Pinter wrote The
Birthday Party in 1957. The Birthday Party is Pinter’s
first full length play, and the first of three plays considered his “comedy of
menace” pieces. "Comedy of menace," a term coined by critic Irving
Wardle, describes a play which paints a realistic picture while creating a
subtext of intrigue and confusion, as if the playwright were employing a
sleight-of-hand trick.
The Birthday
Party is both extremely conventional and entirely
unique. Most of its elements are easy to recognize and understand, but the
relationships between those elements are slippery and difficult to pinpoint.
Pinter's work is prized for the way it approaches and comments upon the
limitations of communication, and The Birthday Party is no
exception. The play, especially in performance, suggests that our attempts to
communicate with one another are futile and often tinged with deep-seeded
resentments that we are unable to fully articulate. The truth, in order words,
lies in the silence, not in the words characters use.
To
best understand the play, it is useful to know about the famous 'Pinter pause.'
Even a cursory scan of the play will reveal how precisely Pinter uses silence
and pauses in telling his story. While it is perhaps not accurate to interpret
this silence as deliberately designed to communicate an idea, it certainly does
create a general unease, a feeling of sinister motives that has become a
hallmark of the writer's work. Please see the "Theatre of the Absurd"
section of the note for more specifics about this style.
The
most prominent conflict in Act II is that between order and chaos. The act
opens with a symbol of order taken to an almost perverse extreme - McCann
methodically tears the newspaper into identical strips. The symbol serves as
representation of how he and Goldberg approach their "job" - they are
insidious and deliberate in their infiltration of the house, and not too quick
to make their move. Interestingly, this same symbol will represent the chaos they
leave behind when it resurfaces in Act III. One of the play's most famous
scenes is the interrogation, for several reasons. Most prominent is Pinter's
use of language and overlapping dialogue. The interrogation begins with
somewhat legitimate questions, but quickly falls into a surreal mirage of
ridiculousness. Both tactics, coming so quick on top of one another, serve to
deepen Stanley’s paranoia, and lay the foundation for his nervous breakdown at
the end of Act II. In performance, this scene plays quickly and violently, with
the ridiculousness of the language only reinforcing the sinister, torturous
intent of the characters. Again, what they say is less affecting than the way
they say it, the true motivation behind the meaningless words.
As
a whole, the structure of The Birthday Party seems very
traditional. There are three acts, arranged in chronological order, and the
first and third acts parallel one another. Both Act I and Act III begin with
Meg and Petey's morning routine, although Act III reflects the play's descent
into depravity. Meg does not have breakfast to serve in Act III, and she is
frantic to remedy the oversight. As an interesting side detail, she does
remember to pour Petey's tea, whereas she forgot in Act I. Because of what she
has gone through since Act I, Meg is ungrounded, not so easily submerged into
the superficial routine of the beginning. In many ways, Petey is the central
character of Act III, since he changes during it. At the beginning, when Meg
realizes that the drum has broken but does not remember how it happened, Petey
simply tells her she can get another one. There is a bit of dramatic irony
since the audience realizes that the drum represents Stanley - much as it is
broken, so is he mentally unstable. Petey's growth in the Act is realizing that
while Meg could conceivably get a new boarder like Stanley, his particular
absence will likely shatter her fragile world. The play ends with his lie to
her; a lie intended to prolong her eventual breakdown. Considering the implications
that Petey might have a sense of the strange Meg/Stanley relationship, his
desire to maintain her illusion reveals his discovery of Stanley's importance.
If she falls apart, then their pleasant, comfortable life might also fall
apart.
At
the end, Meg remains blissfully unaware of the situation. It is telling that
the play ends with a confirmation of her delusion. The final exchange is full
of dramatic irony - she has constructed a reality that we know to be false,
both because Meg was not the belle of the ball, and because Petey was not there
to know it. The play ends with a scenario of ambiguity and delusion, which
falls perfectly in line with the themes it explores throughout.
In
a published speech entitled “Writing for the Theatre,” Pinter offered that
Petey’s exclamation - “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do!” - defined his
mind-set, his plays, and his entire career. Neither Pinter nor his characters
conform to established means of interpretation, and he makes every effort to
avoid easy answers that could be interpreted as the author's moral message.
Instead, we are to leave Pinter's plays - The Birthday Party included
- unsure exactly what is true, both about the character on stage and about
ourselves.
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