The Birthday Party
by Harold Pinter
Summary
Stanley Webber, a former pianist somewhere in his late thirties, has been the only lodger for some time at a rundown seaside boarding house run by Meg and Petey Boles, and Meg treats him with an odd, hovering mix of mothering and flirtation that Stanley tolerates without ever quite returning. Two strangers, Goldberg and McCann, arrive asking for a room, and though nobody explains who sent them or why, they announce it is Stanley's birthday and insist on a party that night, an occasion Stanley clearly did not ask for and increasingly does not want. Harold Pinter never says outright what organization, if any, Goldberg and McCann represent, or what exactly Stanley has done to deserve their attention, and the play's menace comes entirely from that withheld explanation.
During the party, Goldberg and McCann corner Stanley with a barrage of accusatory, nonsensical questions, interrogating him until he cannot speak in complete sentences, and the evening collapses into violence: McCann breaks Stanley's glasses and traps his foot inside a child's drum, and Stanley, unraveling completely, tries to strangle Meg and then attempts to assault a neighbor, Lulu, before the two men subdue him. The next morning, dressed now in a suit rather than his usual clothes, Stanley is walked out to a waiting car by Goldberg and McCann, who list his failures to him one final time and address him as though he no longer has a name of his own. Petey, the landlord, offers one line of resistance, telling Stanley not to let them tell him what to do, then does nothing further to stop them.
Meg comes home from the shops unaware Stanley has gone, and the play ends on her oblivion rather than on any explanation of what has actually happened to him. Pinter builds the whole piece out of ordinary sounding conversation that keeps curdling into threat without ever once naming the threat directly, and it suits a reader willing to accept a play that refuses, on principle, to resolve into a tidy explanation.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Harold Pinter the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature for work that uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms, a description that fits The Birthday Party as precisely as anything he wrote later. The play premiered in London in 1958 and closed within a week after hostile reviews, a commercial and critical failure so complete that the critic Harold Hobson then published a belated rave in The Sunday Times under the headline The Screw Turns Again, a review widely credited with saving the play's reputation and turning it, over the following decades, into one of the defining works of modern British theater.
Pinter was gravely ill by the time of the 2005 ceremony and delivered his Nobel lecture, Art, Truth and Politics, by video from a wheelchair, using the address to deliver a sustained, sharply worded attack on American and British foreign policy, including the invasion of Iraq. His publisher accepted the medal on his behalf in Stockholm while the recorded lecture played on screens at the ceremony.