Birthday Party (1957) is the second full play by Harold Pinter. This is one of the most famous and most played plays.
In a shabby slum house setting, a small birthday party turned into a nightmare on the unexpected arrival of two cynical foreigners. This drama is classed as a threat comedy, characterized by Pinteresque elements such as ambiguous identity, confusion of time and place, and dark political symbolism.
Video The Birthday Party (play)
Character
- Petey , men in their sixties
- Meg , women in their sixties
- Stanley , men in their late thirties
- Lulu , a woman in her early twenties
- Goldberg , men in their fifties
- McCann , a thirty-year-old guy
( Birthday Party [Grove Press ed.] 8)
Maps The Birthday Party (play)
Summary
Birthday Party is about Stanley Webber, a former piano player living in a shabby boardinghouse run by Meg and Petey Boles, in a coastal English town, "probably on the south coast, not too far from London". Two frightening strangers, Goldberg and McCann, who arrived on his birthday and who seemed to come looking for him, turned the seemingly innocuous birthday party held by Meg into a nightmare.
Genre
Birthday Party has been described (some say "pigeonholed") by Irving Wardle and later critics as "threat comedy" and by Martin Esslin as an example of Theater Absurd. This includes features such as fluidity and ambiguity of time, place, and identity and language disintegration.
Reception
Produced by Michael Codron and David Hall, the drama had a world premium at Theater Arts, in Cambridge, England, on April 28, 1958, where the drama was "warmly welcomed" on pre-London tours, in Oxford and Wolverhampton, where it also met with "positive reception" as "the most enchanting experience that the Grand Theater has had for months."
On May 19, 1958, production was transferred to Lyric Opera House, Hammersmith (now Lyric Hammersmith), to dÃÆ'Â © but in London, where it was a commercial failure and largely critical, inciting "puzzling hysteria" and closed after only eight performances. The weekend after it was closed, Harold Hobson's delayed review, "The Screw Turns Again", appeared on The Sunday Times, saving his critical reputation and allowing him to become one of the modern classics. stage.
The Lyric celebrated the 50th anniversary of the drama with a revival, directed by artistic director David Farr, and related events from 8 to 24 May 2008, including a gala and reception hosted by Harold Pinter on May 19, 2008, exactly fifty years after London back.
Interpretation
Like many other Pinter games, very little expository information on Birthday Party can be verified; this is often contradicted by the characters and if not ambiguous, and therefore, one can not take what they say at face value. For example, in Act One, Stanley describes his career, saying "I've played piano all over the world," reducing it immediately to "Whole country," and then, after " pause ", undercuts both self-representation hyperbolic in stating "I once gave a concert."
While the title and dialogue refer to Meg's plan to celebrate Stanley's birthday: "It's your birthday, Stan, I'll keep it secret until tonight," even the "fact" is dubious, because Stanley denied it was his birthday: "This is not My birthday, Meg "(48), told Goldberg and McCann:" After all, this is not my birthday. [No] it's not until next month, "he added, in response to McCann's words," No according to the woman [Meg], "" She? She's crazy, rounded the bend "(53).
Although Meg claims that her home is a "boarding house," her husband Petey, confronted by "two men" who "wonder if we can put it up for a few nights" is surprised that Meg already has "got ready room" (23) Stanley (being the only boarder), also responded to what seemed to him to be Goldberg and McCann suddenly as a potential guest on his "short vacation" should, denying out that it was a boarding house: "This is a silly home to choose from. [...] Because it's not a boarding house, it's never been "(53).
McCann claimed to have no knowledge of Stanley or Maidenhead when Stanley asked him "Ever been near Maidenhead? [...] There is a Fuller teashop I used to have my tea there [...] and Boots Library I seem to connect you with High Street [...] A charming city, do not you think? [...] A quiet and growing community I was born and raised there I live far from the main path "(51); but Goldberg later named the two companies that Stanley used to connect Goldberg often and perhaps McCann to Maidenhead: "Little Austin, tea at Fuller's book library from Boots, and I'm satisfied" (70). Of course, both Stanley and Goldberg could have created this real "memory" because they both seem to have found other details about their previous lives, and here Goldberg can easily lift the details of his own mention of Stanley, which he has heard; as Merritt observes, the factual basis for such apparent relevance in the dialogue spoken by the Pinter character remains ambiguous and subject to various interpretations.
The identity shift ") makes ambiguous the past: Goldberg is called" Nat, "but in his stories in the past he says that he is called" Simey "(73) and also" Benny "(92). ), and he calls McCann "Dermot" (in talking to Petey [87]) and "Seamus" (in talking to McCann [93]). Given such contradictions, the true names of these characters and thus identity remain unclear. According to John Russell Brown (94), "Lies are important to the Pinter dialogue, not only when they can be detected only by rigorous references from one scene to another.... Several more striking lies are simply delivered so the audience is encouraged to seek more from what will be revealed.This is part of Pinter's two-way tactic to awaken the audience's desire for verification and repeatedly disappoints this desire "(Brown 94).
Despite Stanley, just before the lights went off during the birthday party, " started strangling Meg (78), she did not have any memory about it the next morning, quite possibly because she was drinking too much and got tipsy (71- 74), aware of the fact that Goldberg and McCann had removed Stanley from home - Petey kept the information from him when he asked, "Is he still in bed?" By replying "Yes, he... is still asleep" - he ended the game that focusing on himself and romanticizing his role at the party, "I'm a prima donna ball. [...] I know. "(102) For some, Petey's last answer only makes sense if the frame of the whole game is in Meg's mind, that his discovery of booth 'necessary' in an empty marriage, and what the audience has seen is a tragic 'possibility' - no doubt followed by another narration when the booth 'goes down'.
Me than Petey Boles
While touring with L. du Garde A Horse! A Horse! , Pinter found himself in Eastbourne without shelter. He meets a stranger in a pub who says, "I can take you to some excavations but I will not recommend them appropriately," and then bring Pinter to the house where he lives. Pinter told his official biographer, Michael Billington,
I went to this excavation and found, in short, a very large woman who was a host and a small man, the landlord. There was no one else there, apart from the dormitory residents, and the excavations were really very dirty... I slept in the attic with the guy I met at the pub... we shared the loft and there was a couch on my bed... supported so I saw this sofa from where hair and dust fell continuously. And I said to the man, "What are you doing here?" And he said, "Oh well I was... I'm a pianist, I played at a concert party here and I gave up."... The woman is really a greedy character, always ruffling her head and tickling her and making her sick and not leaving her alone. And when I asked him why he lived, he said, "There is nowhere else to go."
According to Billington, "The lonely population, the gluttonous host, the silent husband: these numbers, eventually becoming Stanley, Meg, and Petey, sound like the characters on Donald McGill's beach postcard" ( Harold Pinter 76).
Goldberg and McCann
Goldberg and McCann "not only represent the most autocratic Western religions, but also the two most persecuted races" (Billington, Harold Pinter, 80). Goldberg goes by many names, sometimes Nat, but when talking about his past he mentions that he was called by the name of "Simey" and also "Benny". He seems to idolize Uncle Barney when he mentions him many times during play. Goldberg is described as a Jew who is reinforced by his characteristic Jewish name and the proper use of Yiddish words. McCann is a priest who has no stone and has two names. Petey refers to him as Dermot, but Goldberg calls him Seamus. Sarcasm in the following exchange raises some distance in their relationship:
McCann: You have always been a true Christian
GOLDBERG: Di satu sisi.
Stanley Webber
Stanley Webber - "a very famous Jewish name, coincidentally - is a man who sustains his uncertain sense through fantasy, bluff, violence, and his own form of manipulation of power games, his treatment of Meg at first rough, funny, seductive,.. , but as soon as he makes a mood-altering revelation - 'I have to prepare everything for both men' - he is as dangerous as the cornered animal "(Billington, Harold Pinter).asaerutheen
Lulu
Lulu is a woman in her twenties "who Stanley tried in vain to rape" (Billington, Harold Pinter 112) during a titular birthday party at the end of the second round.
Themes
According to Pinter's official biographer Michael Billington at Harold Pinter, echoing Pinter's own retrospective view, the Birthday Party is a "profound political game about the individual's imperative needs for resistance, "however, according to Billington, although he" doubts whether this is conscious on the part of Pinter, "it is also" personal, obsessive work of the past; about some lost world, whether real or ideal, where all but one of the characters are ready to be escaped... From the beginning, the decisive quality of the game of Pinter is not so much fear and threat - even though they are no doubt present - as yearning for the loss of Eden as protection from uncertainty, miasmic present "(82).
As quoted by Arnold P. Hinchliffe, Polish critic Grzegorz Sinko pointed out that at the Birthday Party we saw the destruction of the victim from the point of view of the victim himself:
"People feel like saying that two executioners, Goldberg and McCann, stand for all the principles of state and social conformism.Goldberg refers to the 'work' in the official Kafka-esque language which robs the evil of all reason and reality." Stanley, Sinko added:] "Maybe Stanley will meet his death there or maybe he will only receive conformist brainwashing after that he was promised... many other civilizational gifts...."
In an interview with Mel Gussow, which was the production of the 1988 Classical Phase Company of the Birthday Party , which was later paired with Mountain Language in CSC production in 1989, both David Strathairn as Stanley, Gussow asks Pinter: "Birthday Party has the same story as One for the Road ?"
In an original interview first published on The New York Times on December 30, 1988, Gussow quoted Pinter as stating: "The character of the old man, Petey, says one of the most important lines I have ever written. When Stanley was taken away, Petey said, 'Stan, do not let them tell you what to do.' I've been through that line all my life, no more than now. "
In response to Gussow's question, Pinter referred to all three dramas when he replied: "This is the destruction of the individual, the independent voice of an individual I believe precisely what the United States does to Nicaragua This is a terrible act If you see child abuse, You recognize it and you cringe.If you do it yourself, you do not seem to know what you're doing. "
As Bob Bows observes in his review of the 2008 production of Germinal Stage Denver, whereas the first "Birthday Party" seems to be a direct story of a pianist who now works in a dilapidated boardinghouse, "in this game as in other dramas, "behind the surface of symbolism... in the silence between their character and their words, Pinter opens the door to another world, convincing and intimate: the part we hide from ourselves"; in the end, "Are we taking Goldberg and McCann for being devils and agents or only their earthly messengers, masterminds of the state-state apparatus, or some variation thereof, the Pinter metaphor of the strange party pinned by birth and death is interesting. received the blink of the eye we call life. "
Selected production history
London London premiÃÆ'¨re
Lyric Hammersmith, London, England, directed by Peter Wood, May 1958.
- Cast
- Willoughby Gray, like Petey
- Beatrix Lehmann, as Meg
- Richard Pearson, like Stanley
- Wendy Hutchinson, as Lulu
- John Slater, like Goldberg
- John Stratton, as McCann
( Birthday Party [Grove Press ed.] 8)
New York City premiÃÆ'¨re
Booth Theater, New York, USA, directed by Alan Schneider, October 1967.
- Cast
- Henderson Forsythe, as Petey
- Ruth White, like Meg
- James Patterson, like Stanley
- Alexandra Berlin, like Lulu
- Ed Flanders, like Goldberg
- Edward Winter, as McCann
( Birthday Party [Grove Press ed.] 8) Production is profiled in William Goldman's book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway .
Selected regional and outdoor New Broadway New York production
1972
City College of San Francisco production, March 1972; Stanley is played by Lance Greenfield.
1981
Oregon Shakespeare Festival, directed by Andrew J. Traister.
1988-1990
Classic Stage Company (CSC Repertory Theater), New York City, directed by Carey Perloff; first production from 12 April to 22 May 1988; second production in double bills with premiums from America Mountain Language , from 31 October to 23 December 1989).
2003-2004
American Repertory Theater (ART), Loeb Drama Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, directed by Joanne Akalaitis, from 6 to 27 March 2004.
2005
Northwest High School Theater School, Vernon Solomon Center for the Performing Arts, Northwest High School, Ft. Worth, Texas, directed by Alva Hascall, autumn 2005
2006-2007
- Ethel M. Barber Theater, from Theater & amp; Center for Interpretation, School of Communications, at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, directed by Jason Tyne-Zimmerman, in November 2006.
- The Irish Classical Theater Company at Andrews Theater, Buffalo, New York, directed by Greg Natale, from January to February 2007.
- Bruka Theater, 99 North Virginia Street, Reno, Nevada, directed by Tom Plunkett, in July 2007.
- The Stage Center Theater, at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, Illinois, directed by Dan Wirth, from November to December 2006.
2007-2008
Germinal Stage Denver, Denver, Colorado, directed by Ed Baierlein, from April 4 to May 4, 2008.
Lyric Hammersmith, London, England, directed by David Farr, from May 8 to May 24, 2008 (Lee); "Players include [d]: Sian Brooke, Sheila Hancock, Lloyd Hutchinson, Justin Salinger, Alan Williams, Nicholas Woodeson" (revival site).
2009
The Melbourne Theater Company presents 'The Birthday Party' at Fairfax Theater, The Arts Center
The next noteworthy French revival, March 2009
L'Anniversaire ( Birthday Party ), adapted and directed by Michel Fagadau, in ThÃÆ'  © à ¢  ¢  ¢ tre des Champs Elysà © Ã… © es, Paris, until March 26, 2009.
Cast:
- Lorant Deutsch
- Jean-François StÃÆ'Â © venin
- Andrà © dan FerrÃÆ' © ol
- Nicolas Vaude
- Jacques Boudet
- milis Chesnais
2011
The Kansas City Actors Theater (KCAT) presents the Birthday Party, directed by Bruce Roach, in a treasury with three one-act Pinter, The Collection The Lover The Lover The Lover i> and Evening, August 16 - September 11, 2011.
Teatro La Plaza, Lima, PerÃÆ'º, presents "La fiesta de cumpleaÃÆ' Â ± os" (Birthday Party) directed by Chela de Ferrari
2013
Steppenwolf Theater Company, Chicago directed by Austin Pendleton January 24 - April 28, 2013. The players include Ian Barford as "Stanley", John Mahoney as "Petey", and Moira Harris as "Meg".
2018
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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