The Birthday Party (1957) is the second full-length play by Harold Pinter and one of Pinter's

best-known and most-frequently performed plays. After its hostile London reception almost ended
Pinter's playwriting career, it went on to be considered "a classic".
[1]

Produced by Michael Codron and David Hall, the play had its world premire 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, where it also met with a "positive reception" as "the
most enthralling experience the Grand Theatre has given us in many months."
[1][2][3]

On 19 May 1958, the production moved to the Lyric Opera House, Hammersmith (now the Lyric
Hammersmith),
[4]
for its dbut in London, where it was a commercial and mostly critical failure,
instigating "bewildered hysteria" and closing after only eight performances.
[1][2][5]
The weekend
after it had already closed, Harold Hobson's belated rave review, "The Screw Turns Again",
appeared in The Sunday Times,
[6]
rescuing its critical reputation and enabling it to become one of
the classics of the modern stage.
[1][5][7][8]

The Lyric celebrated the play's 50th anniversary with a revival, directed by artistic director David
Farr, and related events from 8 to 24 May 2008, including a gala performance and reception
hosted by Harold Pinter on 19 May 2008, exactly fifty years after its London premire.
[1][5][9][10]

Summary[edit]
The Birthday Party is about Stanley Webber, an erstwhile piano player in his 30s, who lives in a
rundown boarding house, run by Meg and Petey Boles, in an Englishseaside town, "probably on
the south coast, not too far from London".
[11][12]
Two sinister strangers, Goldberg and McCann,
who arrive supposedly on his birthday and who appear to have come looking for him, turn
Stanley's apparently innocuous birthday party organized by Meg into a nightmare.
[8][13]

Genre[edit]
The Birthday Party has been described (some say "pigeonholed") by Irving Wardle and later
critics as a "Comedy of menace"
[14]
and by Martin Esslin as an example of the Theatre of the
Absurd.
[15]
It includes such features as the fluidity and ambiguity of time, place, and identity and
the disintegration of language.
[15][16]

Interpretation[edit]
Like many of Pinter's other plays, very little of the expository information in The Birthday Party is
verifiable; it is often 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 hyperbolic self-representations in stating "I
once gave a concert."
[17]

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 "got a room ready" (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.
[16][18]

Shifting identities (cf. "the theme of identity") makes the past ambiguous: Goldberg is called "Nat,"
but in his stories of the past he says that he was called "Simey" (73) and also "Benny" (92), and
he refers to McCann as both "Dermot" (in talking to Petey [87]) and "Seamus" (in talking to
McCann [93]). Given such contradictions, these characters' actual names and thus identities
remain unclear. According to John Russell Brown (94), "Falsehoods are important for Pinter's
dialogue, not least when they can be detected only by careful reference from one scene to
another.... Some of the more blatant lies are so casually delivered that the audience is
encouraged to look for more than is going to be disclosed. This is a part of Pinter's two-pronged
tactic of awakening the audience's desire for verification and repeatedly disappointing this desire"
(Brown 94).
[18]

Although Stanley, just before the lights go out during the birthday party, "begins to strangle
Meg (78), she has no memory of that the next morning, quite possibly because she had drunk too
much and gotten tipsy (7174); oblivious to the fact that Goldberg and McCann have removed
Stanley from the house Petey keeps that information from her when she inquires, "Is he still in
bed?" by answering "Yes, he's ... still asleep"she ends the play focusing on herself and
romanticising her role in the party, "I was the belle of the ball. [...] I know I was" (102).
Characters[edit]
Petey, a man in his sixties
Meg, a woman in her sixties
Stanley, a man in his late thirties
Lulu, a girl in her twenties
Goldberg, a man in his fifties
McCann, a man of thirty
(The Birthday Party [Grove Press ed.] 8)
Meg and Petey Boles[edit]
While on tour with L. du Garde's A Horse! A Horse!, Pinter found himself in Eastbourne without a
place to stay. He met a stranger in a pub who said "I can take you to some digs but I wouldn't
recommend them exactly," and then led Pinter to the house where he stayed. Pinter told his
official biographer, Michael Billington,
I went to these digs and found, in short, a very big woman who was the landlady and a little man,
the landlord. There was no one else there, apart from a solitary lodger, and the digs were really
quite filthy ... I slept in the attic with this man I'd met in the pub ... we shared the attic and there
was a sofa over my bed ... propped up so I was looking at this sofa from which hairs and dust fell
continuously. And I said to the man, "What are you doing here?" And he said, "Oh well I used to
be...I'm a pianist. I used to play in the concert-party here and I gave that up." ... The woman was
really quite a voracious character, always tousled his head and tickled him and goosed him and
wouldn't leave him alone at all. And when I asked him why he stayed, he said, "There's nowhere
else to go."
[19]

According to Billington, "The lonely lodger, the ravenous landlady, the quiescent husband: these
figures, eventually to become Stanley, Meg, and Petey, sound like figures in a Donald
McGill seaside postcard" (Harold Pinter 76).
Goldberg and McCann[edit]
Goldberg and McCann "represent not only the West's most autocratic religions, but its two most
persecuted races" (Billington, Harold Pinter 80). Goldberg goes by many names sometimes Nat
but when talking about his past he mentions that he was called by the names "Simey" and also
"Benny". He seems to idolise his Uncle Barney as he mentions him many times during the play.
Goldberg is portrayed as a Jewish man which is reinforced by his typically Jewish name and his
appropriate use of Yiddish words. McCann is an unfrocked priest and has two names. Petey
refers to him as Dermot but Goldberg calls him Seamus. The sarcasm in the following exchange
evokes some distance in their relationship:
McCANN: You've always been a true Christian
GOLDBERG: In a way.
Stanley Webber[edit]
Stanley Webber is "a palpably Jewish name, incidentallyis a man who shores up his precarious
sense of self through fantasy, bluff, violence and his own manipulative form of power-play. His
treatment of Meg initially is rough, playful, teasing, ... but once she makes the fateful, mood-
changing revelation 'I've got to get things ready for the two gentlemen'he's as dangerous as
a cornered animal" (Billington, Harold Pinter 78).
Lulu[edit]
Lulu is a woman in her twenties "whom Stanley tries vainly to rape" (Billington, Harold Pinter 112)
during the birthday party in Act II.
Themes[edit]
According to Pinter's official biographer, Michael Billington, in Harold Pinter, echoing Pinter's own
retrospective view of it, The Birthday Party is "a deeply political play about the individual's
imperative need for resistance,"
[citation needed]
yet, according to Billington, though he "doubts
whether this was conscious on Pinter's part," it is also "a private, obsessive work about time past;
about some vanished world, either real or idealised, into which all but one of the characters
readily escapes. ... From the very outset, the defining quality of a Pinter play is not so much fear
and menace though they are undoubtedly present as a yearning for some lost Eden as a
refuge from the uncertain, miasmic present" (82).
As quoted by Arnold P. Hinchliffe, Polish critic Grzegorz Sinko points out that in The Birthday
Party "we see the destruction of the victim from the victim's own point of view:
"One feels like saying that the two executioners, Goldberg and McCann, stand for all the
principles of the state and social conformism. Goldberg refers to his 'job' in a typically Kafka-
esque official language which deprives the crimes of all sense and reality." ... [Of Stanley's
removal, Sinko adds:] "Maybe Stanley will meet his death there or maybe he will only receive a
conformist brainwashing after which he is promised ... many other gifts of civilization...."
[20]

In an interview with Mel Gussow, which is about the 1988 Classic Stage Company production
of The Birthday Party, later paired with Mountain Language in a 1989 CSC production, in both of
which David Strathairn played Stanley, Gussow asked Pinter: "The Birthday Party has the same
story as One for the Road?"
In the original interview first published in The New York Times, on December 30, 1988, Gussow
quotes Pinter as stating: "The character of the old man, Petey, says one of the most important
lines I've ever written. As Stanley is taken away, Petey says, 'Stan, don't let them tell you what to
do.' I've lived that line all my damn life. Never more than now."
[21]

In responding to Gussow's question, Pinter refers to all three plays when he replies: "It's the
destruction of an individual, the independent voice of an individual. I believe that is precisely what
the United States is doing to Nicaragua. It's a horrifying act. If you see child abuse, you recognize
it and you're horrified. If you do it yourself, you apparently don't know what you're doing."
[22]

As Bob Bows observes in his review of the 2008 Germinal Stage Denver production, whereas at
first " 'The Birthday Party' appears to be a straightforward story of a former working pianist now
holed up in a decrepit boarding house," in this play as in his other plays, "behind the surface
symbolism ... in the silence between the characters and their words, Pinter opens the door to
another world, cogent and familiar: the part we hide from ourselves"; ultimately, "Whether we take
Goldberg and McCann to be the devil and his agent or simply their earthly emissaries, the
puppeteers of the church-state apparatus, or some variation thereof, Pinter's metaphor of a
bizarre party bookended by birth and death is a compelling take on this blink-of-an-eye we call
life."
[23]