Page 319 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

Unit 27: Harold Pinter— Introduction to the Author and the Text

of a woman and a man who stayed in the seedy place. The flophouse became the model for the Notes
rundown boarding house of the play and the woman and her tenant the models, respectively, for
the characters of Meg Boles and Stanley Webber.
In an earlier work, The Room, a one-act play, Pinter had worked on themes and motifs that he would
carry over into The Birthday Party and some of his succeeding plays. Among these themes are the
failure of language to serve as an adequate tool of communication, the use of place as a sanctum
that is violated by menacing intruders, and the surrealistic confusions that obscure or distort fact.

Elucidate that language as an adequate tool of communication is a failure in context
of the play The Birthday Party.
Directed by Pinter himself, the finished full-length play premiered in Cambridge, England, at the
Arts Theatre, on April 28, 1958. There and on tour in Oxford it was quite successful, but when,
under the direction of Peter Wood, it moved to London and later opened on May 19 at the Lyric
Opera House in Hammersmith, it met with harsh reviews and closed down within a week. Among
the reviewers, only Harold Hobson of the Sunday Times saw much promise in the play. He thought
that Pinter had considerable originality and was ‘‘the most disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical
London.’’ However, his review appeared too late to do the production any good. The show was
already off the boards, done in by abysmal attendance, including one matinee audience of six, and
persistently hostile reviews. Most critics opined that Pinter floundered in obscurity and suffered
from the negative influence of Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Eugene Ionesco (The Bald Prima
Donna), and other avant-garde writers.
Pinter would later marvel at the fact that in London the play was completely massacred by the
critics but noted that it was the only maltreatment he had received from reviewers and that it never
dimmed his interest in writing. The work, in fact, became the dramatist’s first full-length comedy of
menace, a group of plays that secured Pinter’s reputation as a premier, avant-garde playwright.
Subsequent productions were much better received, including the play’s 1964 revival at London’s
Aldwych Theatre and its 1968 Broadway premier at the Booth Theatre in New York. By the mid-1960s,
the burgeoning appreciation of absurdist drama and the success of other plays by Pinter, including
The Dumbwaiter (1959) and The Caretaker (1960), had secured for The Birthday Party a reputation as a
classic in the dramatic genre that literary critic Martin Esslin dubbed the Theatre of the Absurd.

Self Assessment

Multiple Choice Questions:
7. Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party, the finished full length play was first premiered at
(a) the Arts Theatre in Cambridge (b) at London’s Aldwych Theatre
(c) at Lyric Opera House in Hammersmith (d) at Booth Theatre in New York.
8. Twenty-five years later King Charles has a dream, in which Joan and good number of the
other characters show up to have
(a) a chat in the battle (b) a chat in his royal bedroom
(c) a chat in the hundred year war (d) a chat in the battlefield of Orelon.
Fill in the blanks:
9. Harold Pinter had worked on themes and motifs that he would carry over into The Birthday
Part from an earlier work ......, a one-act play.
10. Martin Esslin dubbed the The Birthday Party as ...... .

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