'The Birthday Party' as Pinteresque / Modern play

-: The Birthday Party as the amalgamation of absurdism and realism (Pinteresque Drama) :-

When The Birthday Party, Harold Pinter's first full-length play, opened in London in 1958, the immediate critical response was unanimous. The critics took the way of attack. The reason can be anticipated in the body of the text where it deviates much from the so-called contemporary modern themes, characterization and dialogue. Even it underwent some undeserved attacks like Milton Shulman in 'The Evening Standard' said:

It will be best enjoyed by those who believe that obscurity is its own reward.

However, Pinter preferred to use innovative themes in his plays like a nameless menace, mental disturbance, obsession and jealousy, family hatred and even erotic fantasy. Pinter used the theme of menace for portraying his uniqueness by means of dialogue which realistically produced the menaces in the colloquial speech, the difficulties in bringing comicality and multi-layered meaning, pause and silence had created a style label by the popular imaginations as Pinteresque.

          In Pinter's Comedy of Menace, the laughter and elation of the audience in some or all situations are immediately followed by a feeling of some impending disaster. Meg's first few actions in relationship to Stanley are very funny. She treats him more like a child rather than a bespectacled, groggy, unshaven man (wearing his pyjama jacket) in his thirties(30). She races to his room, rousing him, while he shouts and she laughs wildly. On his matter Bernard F. Dukore on his 'Harold Pinter, Modern Dramatists Series' says:

Underlying these activities, what is often called subtext, is that someone makes Stanley do what he does not want to do — a comic foreshadowing of a non-comic resolution. Furthermore Stanley's comic dissatisfaction with his reward, breakfast, hits at a more disturbing dissatisfaction to come.

          A study of the British theatre before and after Look Back in Anger in 1956 seems to indicate that the rejection of The Birthday Party in London was due to the play clashing with prevailing theatre convention at the time. Although plays with a working-class setting had been performed prior the production of The Birthday Party, the visual impact, which could be very powerful, was enhanced through Stanley's working-class dress code and manner, clashing with the rather lavish upper-middle class drawing room setting in customary use. The audience also faced only working-class speech — words, rhythm and not least: accent. this might have caused a negative reaction as the theatre before 1956 had stressed what the audience probably considered to be beautiful upper-class English diction and enunciation. Moreover, the principal characters required a new type of acting which is more natural. This type of acting considered more common or down-to-earth — at least to the bourgeois middle-class audience.

          Pinter who was and is a playwright of instinct and intuition has a disbelief in the concept of the omniscient narrator, that is he is against the theory where the writer of a well-made play must have knowledge of 'everything': Characters' motives, cause etc. Similarly, we know nothing about Stanley after his departure from boarding house. In Pinter's plays then characterization is fragmentary. As a result, the audience has very little knowledge of the characters. We don't know what Stanley's real name is and even the reason for adopting this name. Who are Goldberg and McCann and why they come in Meg's boarding and also the reason behind their vindictive attitude towards Stanley is unknown to us? Who is Monty to whom they decide to take Stanley?

          Pinter shows his state in the existential view that danger prevails everywhere and life cannot escape from it. Pinter thinks that Stanley, the protagonist, might have committed a serious crime and is on the run for escaping the consequence and legal implications of his life. This is precisely comprehended while he almost never leaves his room and becomes furiously apprehensive when Meg informs him that two gentlemen are coming to stay in their boarding house. Goldberg's constant reference to the "job" he has to execute and finally the interrogation of Stanley by Goldberg and McCann are sometimes funny or comical but have a threatening impact both upon Stanley and the audience.

          Apart from all these, like the Greek tragedy, Pinter employs the device of stichomythia, "verbal fencing match", to heighten the impact of the scene, endowing the words with greater significance. Pinteresque play deliberately avoids the carefully structured plot. In The Birthday Party, we don't know the characters past or future. They only live in present in places of recognizable surroundings.

          Like Beckett, Ionesco and Simson, Pinter's The Birthday Party possess the stump of contemporary updating trend and its fashions but leaving the quality of the language and the lasting power of the images presented on stages to endow the play with the universality of myth and the gravity of high art.