CONTENTS

Preface 2

Chapter One 3-4

Chapter Two 5-6

Chapter Three 7-8

Bibliography 9
 PREFACE

Harold Pinters play The Birthday Party which was massacred by the London audience,

and almost ended Pinters career once went on to become a classic later on in the genre of

Theatre of the Absurd, as dubbed by critic Martin Esslin. The play in fact became his

first full length comedy of menace, a group of plays that secured Pinters reputation as a

premier avant-grade playwright. This paper aims at a critical analysis of this landmark

play as an Absurd Play.

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Chapter One

Introduction

Martin Esslin, a theater critic, coined the term Theater of the Absurd to describe

a number of works being produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s that defied any

traditional genres. The most famous playwright associated with this movement include

Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and of course, Harold Pinter.

The term "absurd" was originally used by Albert Camus in his 1942 essay Myth of

Sisyphus, wherein he described the human condition as meaningless and absurd. The

key element to an absurdist play is that the main characters are out of sync with the world

around them. There is no discernable reasoning behind their strangeness, though a

threatening sense of change shakes their existence to the core.

Influences on the absurdist theater go as far back as the Elizabethan tragicomedies

of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The tragic plays Macbeth and Hamlet offer

segments of comedy that shift the play's perspective, if only for the briefest moments. For

example, Hamlets wit and the porter scene in Macbeth offer moments of comedy to

alleviate the drama's intensity. Other influences on the absurdist playwrights include the

work of Sigmund Freud, and the Surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s, which

introduced the avant-garde to mainstream media.

However, the largest influence was World War II and its aftermath. Like Pinter,

who was a child during the war, many Englishmen and women felt disillusioned once the
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war was over. They were angry and upset with the world, but found it difficult to express

their collective opinions. In such a damaged world, it was no longer feasible to use

traditional methods of storytelling on stage. The human condition was too complex and

fragmented, and the old forms of language were hence inappropriate for exploring it.

To shake audiences from their more conventional viewing habits, the playwrights

of the Absurdist Theater used traditional settings to ease the audience into their plays, and

then shocked them with surreal imagery, uncommon circumstances, or fragmented

language. Language within the Absurdist Theater often transcended its base meaning. As

in The Birthday Party, nothing is as it seems and no one speaks the whole truth. Also, the

use of silence as language was often utilized in these plays.

The drama of the absurdist theater is dreamlike, almost lyrical. Like the Surrealists

before them, the absurdist playwrights use imagery, subtext, mythology, and allegory to

express a deeper meaning which is often never fully explained. In fact, the playwrights of

the Theater of the Absurd allowed their plays to speak for themselves. Pinter explained

this absurdist concept best in his 1962 speech Writing for the Theatre, which was

presented at the National Student Drama Festival in Bristol. He said, I suggest there can

be no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true

and what is false. The thin line between truth and lies is perhaps the defining

characteristic of the Theater of the Absurd.

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Chapter Two

Theatre of the Absurd

Dramatic works of certain European and American dramatists of the 1950s and early 60s

who agreed with the Existentialist philosopher Albert Camuss assessment, in his essay

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), that the human situation is essentially absurd, devoid of

purpose. The term is also loosely applied to those dramatists and the production of those

works. Though no formal Absurdist movement existed as such, dramatists as diverse

as Samuel Beckett, Eugne Ionesco, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter, and a

few others shared a pessimistic vision of humanity struggling vainly to find a purpose and

to control its fate. Humankind in this view is left feeling hopeless, bewildered, and

anxious.

The ideas that inform the plays also dictate their structure. Absurdist playwrights,

therefore, did away with most of the logical structures of traditional theatre. There is little

dramatic action as conventionally understood; however frantically the characters perform,

their busyness serves to underscore the fact that nothing happens to change their

existence. In Becketts Waiting for Godot (1952), plot is eliminated, and a timeless,

circular quality emerges as two lost creatures, usually played as tramps, spend their days
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waitingbut without any certainty of whom they are waiting for or of whether he, or it,

will ever come.

Language in an Absurdist play is often dislocated, full of cliches, puns, repetitions,

and non sequiturs. The characters in Ionescos The Bald Soprano (1950) sit and talk,

repeating the obvious until it sounds like nonsense, thus revealing the inadequacies of

verbal communication. The ridiculous, purposeless behaviour and talk give the plays a

sometimes dazzling comic surface, but there is an underlying serious message of

metaphysical distress. This reflects the influence of comic tradition drawn from such

sources as commedia dellarte, vaudeville, and music hall combined with such theatre

arts as mime and acrobatics. At the same time, the impact of ideas as expressed by the

Surrealist, Existentialist, and Expressionist schools and the writings of Franz Kafka is

evident.

Originally shocking in its flouting of theatrical convention while popular for its apt

expression of the preoccupations of the mid-20th century, the Theatre of the Absurd

declined somewhat by the mid-1960s; some of its innovations had been absorbed into the

mainstream of theatre even while serving to inspire further experiments. Some of the

chief authors of the Absurd have sought new directions in their art, while others continue

to work in the same vein.

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Chapter Three

The Birthday Party as an Absurd Play

The Birthday Party is an early play of Harold Pinter and is composed at a stage in his

career when the shadow of Beckett was looming large on him. If Waiting for Godot is the

benchmark for The Theatre of the Absurd, The Birthday Party definitely echoes and

responds to it. The absurdist traits in the play are both thematic and structural.

Thematically speaking, it deals with the radical dislocation of identity in a world where

language hardly communicates anything and is used more as a tool of menace e.g. the

interrogation of Stanley by Goldberg and Maccan. Pinter does not give us any

background information about his characters and this withdrawal leads to unknown

motivations behind the actions of the characters--a typical absurdist motif. The theme of

isolation and a recluse reiterate through the paly. Inverting the Godot-situation, Stan

seems to wait for the Didi-Gogo like pair in Goldberg and Maccan. The two as in Godot

in Beckett's play signify beyond everything else, a cynical obsession with the theme of

death. Even structurally, Pinter's use of Pause and Silence takes a cue from Beckett and

the breakdown of speech that Stanley faces at the end remains an absurdist motif of failed
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communication and growing alienation. The content-structures of Goldberg and Maccan

in Stanley's interrogation shows a beyond to rationality. Their questions they ask are

literally absurd. Like Beckett in Godot, Pinter in Birthday Party, tantalizes us with

multiple symbolic openings as theoretical straitjackets to read the play (e.g. the religious

references, the Jewish and the Irish trope etc.) but collapses them all in an exceedingly

open-ended indeterminacy, which houses the absurdist point of emphasis.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

"The Birthday Party Theater of the Absurd, an Introduction." Study Guides & Essay

Editing. Web. 30 May 2016.

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. "Theatre of the Absurd." Encyclopedia

Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica. Web. 30 May 2016.

"What Traits of The Theatre of the Absurd Do We Come across in the Play The Birthday

Party by Harold Pinter? | ENotes." Enotes.com. Enotes.com. Web. 30 May 2016.