Page 331 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

Unit 29: The Birthday Party: Characterization and Theme

8. The play ends with Stanley’s forced removal from the house by Notes
(a) Goldberg and Lulu (b) Goldberg and McCann
(c) Lulu and Petey (d) Lulu and McCann.
Fill in the blanks:
9. Pinter creates an atmosphere of menace through a variety of dramatic elements and ...... .
10. With the hosting of the birthday party, the play reaches its climax of ...... .
State whether the following statements are true or false:
11. Stanley tries to frighten Meg by prophesying the arrival of wheel-barrow which, of course,
does not come for her.
12. The play ends with Stanley’s willing removal from the house by Goldberg and McCann.

29.3 Summary

• Most plays are a series of actions and manners and therefore there is no surprise that the
characters in The Birthday party are defined by their behaviour.
• The Meg Boles’s good nature is shown in her behaviour with their tenant Stanley calling him
boy and mothering him. She fills a void in her life by turning the Boles’s boarding house
tenant into a kind of surrogate child.
• Petey’s wife, Meg Boles is a good-natured woman in her sixties. If only from a lack of any
reference to offspring of her own, it is implied that she and Petey are childless.
• Like his wife, Petey Boles is in his sixties. He is a deck-chair attendant at the unidentified
seaside resort where he and Meg own their boarding house, which, although it is ‘‘on the
list,’’ has seen much better days.
• Goldberg and McCann represent not only the West’s most autocratic religions, but its two
most persecuted races.
• McCann seems to think that Goldberg is a Christian man but this seems not to be the case as
Goldberg is a typically Jewish name.
• Nat Goldberg, in his fifties, is the older of the two strangers who come to interrogate and
intimidate Stanley before taking him away.
• Stanley Webber is 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.
• Lulu is a woman in her twenties whom Stanley tries vainly to rape during the birthday party
in Act II.
• As in many absurdist works, The Birthday Party is full of disjointed information that defies
efforts to distinguish between reality and illusion.
• The term comedy of menace was first used by David Campton as a subtitle to his four short
plays The Lunatic view.
• Harold Pinter exploited the possibilities of this kind of situation in his early plays like The
Room, Birthday Party and A Slight Ache, where the both the character/s and the audience face
an atmosphere, apparently funny but actually having suggestiveness of some impending threat
from outside.
• Pinter himself explained the situation thus: more often than not the speech only seems to be
funny—the man in question is actually fighting a battle for his life.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 325