The Birthday Party (play)

The Birthday Party (1957) is the second full-length play by Harold Pinter and one of his best-known and most frequently performed plays.

In the setting of a rundown seaside boarding-house, a little birthday party is turned into a nightmare on the unexpected arrival of two sinister strangers. 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.

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

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". 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 organised by Meg into a nightmare.

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

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."

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

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