PLAYS

The Birthday Party (play)

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Cover of first edition

(Encore Publishing, 1959)

The Birthday Party (1957) is the second full-length play by Harold Pinter, first
published in London by Encore Publishing in 1959.[1] It is one of his best-known
and most frequently performed plays.[2]

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." [3]

Contents

 1 Characters
 2 Summary
 3 Plot
o 3.1 Act 1
o 3.2 Act 2
o 3.3 Act 3
 4 Genre
 5 Reception
 6 Interpretation
o 6.1 Meg and Petey Boles
o 6.2 Goldberg and McCann
o 6.3 Stanley Webber
 o 6.4 Lulu
 7 Themes
 8 Selected production history
o 8.1 London première
o 8.2 New York City première
o 8.3 Selected US regional and off-Broadway New York productions
 8.3.1 1972
 8.3.2 1981
 8.3.3 1988–1990
 8.3.4 2003–2004
 8.3.5 2005
 8.3.6 2006–2007
 8.3.7 2007–2008
 8.3.7.1 50th anniversary revival and related celebratory
events
 8.3.8 2009
 8.3.8.1 Notable subsequent French revival, March 2009
o 8.4 2011
 8.4.1 2013
 8.4.2 2018
 9 See also
 10 Notes
 11 Selected bibliography
 12 External links

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

(The Birthday Party, Grove Press ed., 8)

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". [4][5] Two sinister
strangers, Goldberg and McCann, arrive looking for him, supposedly on his
birthday, and turn his apparently-innocuous birthday party organized by Meg into a
nightmare. [6][7]

Plot

Act 1

While Meg prepares to serve her husband Petey breakfast, Stanley, described as a
man "in his late thirties" (23), 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 (30–31);
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 (38), but they speak only vaguely about "this job" they must do with
bureaucratic clichés (41), nevertheless rendering McCann "satisfied" (41). 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.
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!" (101). 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"[8] and by Martin Esslin as an example of
the Theatre of the Absurd.[9] It includes such features as the fluidity and ambiguity
of time, place, and identity and the disintegration of language.[9][10]

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, where it
also met with a "positive reception" as "the most enthralling experience the Grand
Theatre has given us in many months."[11][12][13]

On 19 May 1958, the production moved to the Lyric Opera House, Hammersmith
(now the Lyric Hammersmith),[14] for its début in London, where it was a
commercial and mostly critical failure, instigating "bewildered hysteria" and
closing after only eight performances.[11][12][15] The weekend after it had already
closed, Harold Hobson's belated rave review, "The Screw Turns Again", appeared
in The Sunday Times,[16] rescuing its critical reputation and enabling it to become
one of the classics of the modern stage.[11][15][17][6][11]

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 première.[11][15][18][19]

Interpretation

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."[20]

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.[10][21]

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).[21]

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 got tipsy (71–74); 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). For some,
Petey’s final reply only makes dramatic sense if the framework of the whole play
is in Meg’s mind, that her invention of Stan was ’necessary’ in an empty marriage,
and what the audience has seen was a tragic ‘possible’ - no doubt to be followed by
another narrative when her Stan ‘comes down’.[citation needed]
Meg and Petey Boles

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."[22]

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

Goldberg and McCann "represent not only the West's most autocratic religions, but
its two most persecuted races" (Billington, Harold Pinter 80). James 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

Stanley Webber — "a palpably Jewish name, incidentally — is 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).asaerutheen

Lulu

Lulu is a woman in her twenties "whom Stanley tries vainly to rape" (Billington,
Harold Pinter 112) during the titular birthday party at the end of Act II.

Themes

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...."[23]

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 30 December
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."[24]

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."[25]

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."[26]

Selected production history

London première

Lyric Hammersmith, London, UK, directed by Peter Wood, May 1958.

Cast

 Willoughby Gray, as Petey

 Beatrix Lehmann, as Meg
 Richard Pearson, as Stanley
 Wendy Hutchinson, as Lulu
 John Slater, as Goldberg
 John Stratton, as McCann

(The Birthday Party [Grove Press ed.] 8)

New York City première

Booth Theatre, New York, US, directed by Alan Schneider, October 1967.

Cast

 Henderson Forsythe, as Petey

 Ruth White, as Meg
 James Patterson, as Stanley
 Alexandra Berlin, as Lulu
 Ed Flanders, as Goldberg
 Edward Winter, as McCann

(The Birthday Party [Grove Press ed.] 8) The production was profiled in the
William Goldman book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway.

Selected US regional and off-Broadway New York productions

1972

City College of San Francisco production, March 1972; Stanley played by Lance
Greenfield.

1981

Oregon Shakespeare Festival, directed by Andrew J. Traister.[27]

1988–1990

Classic Stage Company (CSC Repertory Theatre), New York City, directed by
Carey Perloff; first production from 12 April to 22 May 1988; second production
in a double bill with the American première of Mountain Language, from 31
October to 23 December 1989).[28][29]

2003–2004

American Repertory Theater (ART), Loeb Drama Center, Harvard University,

Cambridge, Massachusetts, directed by Joanne Akalaitis, from 6 to 27 March
2004.[17]
2005

Northwest High School Theatre Department, Vernon Solomon Performing Arts

Center, Northwest High School, Ft. Worth, Texas, directed by Alva Hascall, fall
2005

2006–2007

 Ethel M. Barber Theater, of the Theater & Interpretation Center, School of

Communication, at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, directed by
Jason Tyne-Zimmerman, in November 2006.

The bizarre image of McCann blowing in Goldberg's mouth.

 Irish Classical Theatre Company at the Andrews Theatre, Buffalo, New

York, directed by Greg Natale, from January to February 2007.
 Bruka Theatre, 99 North Virginia Street, Reno, Nevada, directed by Tom
Plunkett, in July 2007.[30]
 Stage Center Theatre, at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, Illinois,
directed by Dan Wirth, from November to December 2006.[31]

2007–2008

Germinal Stage Denver, Denver, Colorado, directed by Ed Baierlein, from 4 April

to 4 May 2008.[26][32]

50th anniversary revival and related celebratory events

Lyric Hammersmith, London, UK, directed by David Farr, from 8 May to 24 May
2008 (Lee); "Cast include[d]: Sian Brooke; Sheila Hancock; Lloyd Hutchinson;
Justin Salinger; Alan Williams; Nicholas Woodeson" (revival website).

2009

Melbourne Theatre Company presents 'The Birthday Party' at the Fairfax Theatre,
The Arts Centre

Notable subsequent French revival, March 2009

L'Anniversaire (The Birthday Party), adapted and directed by Michel Fagadau, at

the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Paris, through 26 March 2009.[33]
Cast:

 Lorant Deutsch
 Jean-François Stévenin
 Andréa Ferréol
 Nicolas Vaude
 Jacques Boudet
 Émilie Chesnais[33]

2011

Kansas City Actors Theatre (KCAT) presents The Birthday Party, directed by
Bruce Roach, in repertory with three Pinter one-acts, The Collection, The Lover
and Night, 16 Aug. – 11 September 2011.

Teatro La Plaza, Lima, Perú, presents "La fiesta de cumpleaños"(The Birthday

Party) directed by Chela de Ferrari

2013

Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago directed by Austin Pendleton 24 January

– 28 April 2013. The cast included Ian Barford as "Stanley", John Mahoney as
"Petey", and Moira Harris as "Meg".[citation needed]

2018

The play was revived by Ian Rickson at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London starring
Toby Jones (who reprised the role of Stanley after his 2016 performance for BBC
Radio 3), Stephen Mangan, Zoe Wanamaker[34] and Pearl Mackie,[35] 9 January -
14 April 2018.

The Birthday Party Summary

Act I

The play begins in the living room of a seaside boardinghouse in 1950s England.
Petey, the boardinghouse owner, and his wife Meg, both in their sixties, sit at the
living room table and engage in tepid conversation while eating breakfast. Meg is
an inquisitive character who peppers Petey with repeated questions concerning his
food, his job, etc. Petey informs his wife that two gentlemen will soon arrive to
stay at the boardinghouse; he met them the night before. Meg is flustered by the
news at first, but quickly recovers to promise she will have a room ready for them.
She then calls out to Stanley Webber, their boarder who is asleep upstairs. When
he doesn’t answer, she goes upstairs to fetch him, and then returns a bit disheveled
but amused. Stanley, a bespectacled, unkempt, surly man in his thirties, soon
follows. Petey and Stanley speak of mundane topics while Meg prepares
cornflakes and fried bread for Stanley’s breakfast. After Petey leaves for work, the
atmosphere changes. Meg flirts with Stanley, who jokingly calls her “succulent”
while criticizing her housework. When Meg becomes affectionate, he rudely
pushes her away and insults her. Meg then informs him that two gentlemen are
coming. The news unsettles Stanley, who has been the only boarder for years. He
accuses Meg of lying, but she insists that she speaks the truth.

Before Meg leaves to shop, Lulu, a young girl in her twenties, arrives with a
package. Meg instructs Lulu to keep the package from Stanley, and then she
leaves. Lulu and Stanley chat for a little while, mostly about Stanley’s lack of
enthusiasm and his appearance. Lulu calls him a “wash out” and then quickly exits.
Stanley washes his face in the kitchen, and then leaves by the kitchen door. In the
meantime, Goldberg and McCann enter the living room. They are the two
gentlemen who had requested rooms for the evening.

It becomes immediately apparent that Goldberg and McCann have come under
mysterious circumstances to “finish a job.” The job in question seems to be
Stanley, though details are scarce. Goldberg reassures McCann that they are at the
right house, and that this job will cause no more stress than their jobs usually cause
them. Goldberg rambles on about his uncle until Meg arrives, and introductions are
made.

Goldberg’s sweet temperament and suave demeanor soon set Meg at ease.
Goldberg asks after Stanley, and Meg tells him that Stanley was once a successful
pianist but had to give it up. Meg also reveals that it is Stanley’s birthday, and
Goldberg suggests they have a party. Thrilled with the idea, Meg shows the
gentlemen to their room. Later, Stanley returns to the living room as Meg arrives to
put the groceries away. She tells him about the two gentlemen, and Stanley is
visibly upset to learn Goldberg’s name. To cheer him up, Meg suggests he open his
birthday present, even though Stanley insists that it is not his birthday. To humor
Meg, he opens the package and finds a toy drum with drumsticks. He hangs the
drum around his neck and parades around the table beating the drum merrily until
his rhythm becomes erratic and chaotic. He beats the drum possessively and looms
over Meg with a crazed expression on his face.