Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Preface 2
Bibliography 9
PREFACE
Harold Pinters play The Birthday Party which was massacred by the London audience,
and almost ended Pinters career once went on to become a classic later on in the genre of
Theatre of the Absurd, as dubbed by critic Martin Esslin. The play in fact became his
first full length comedy of menace, a group of plays that secured Pinters reputation as a
premier avant-grade playwright. This paper aims at a critical analysis of this landmark
Chapter One
Introduction
Martin Esslin, a theater critic, coined the term Theater of the Absurd to describe
a number of works being produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s that defied any
traditional genres. The most famous playwright associated with this movement include
Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and of course, Harold Pinter.
The term "absurd" was originally used by Albert Camus in his 1942 essay Myth of
Sisyphus, wherein he described the human condition as meaningless and absurd. The
key element to an absurdist play is that the main characters are out of sync with the world
of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The tragic plays Macbeth and Hamlet offer
segments of comedy that shift the play's perspective, if only for the briefest moments. For
example, Hamlets wit and the porter scene in Macbeth offer moments of comedy to
alleviate the drama's intensity. Other influences on the absurdist playwrights include the
work of Sigmund Freud, and the Surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s, which
However, the largest influence was World War II and its aftermath. Like Pinter,
who was a child during the war, many Englishmen and women felt disillusioned once the
4
war was over. They were angry and upset with the world, but found it difficult to express
their collective opinions. In such a damaged world, it was no longer feasible to use
traditional methods of storytelling on stage. The human condition was too complex and
fragmented, and the old forms of language were hence inappropriate for exploring it.
To shake audiences from their more conventional viewing habits, the playwrights
of the Absurdist Theater used traditional settings to ease the audience into their plays, and
language. Language within the Absurdist Theater often transcended its base meaning. As
in The Birthday Party, nothing is as it seems and no one speaks the whole truth. Also, the
The drama of the absurdist theater is dreamlike, almost lyrical. Like the Surrealists
before them, the absurdist playwrights use imagery, subtext, mythology, and allegory to
express a deeper meaning which is often never fully explained. In fact, the playwrights of
the Theater of the Absurd allowed their plays to speak for themselves. Pinter explained
this absurdist concept best in his 1962 speech Writing for the Theatre, which was
presented at the National Student Drama Festival in Bristol. He said, I suggest there can
be no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true
and what is false. The thin line between truth and lies is perhaps the defining
Chapter Two
Dramatic works of certain European and American dramatists of the 1950s and early 60s
who agreed with the Existentialist philosopher Albert Camuss assessment, in his essay
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), that the human situation is essentially absurd, devoid of
purpose. The term is also loosely applied to those dramatists and the production of those
as Samuel Beckett, Eugne Ionesco, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter, and a
few others shared a pessimistic vision of humanity struggling vainly to find a purpose and
to control its fate. Humankind in this view is left feeling hopeless, bewildered, and
anxious.
The ideas that inform the plays also dictate their structure. Absurdist playwrights,
therefore, did away with most of the logical structures of traditional theatre. There is little
their busyness serves to underscore the fact that nothing happens to change their
existence. In Becketts Waiting for Godot (1952), plot is eliminated, and a timeless,
circular quality emerges as two lost creatures, usually played as tramps, spend their days
6
waitingbut without any certainty of whom they are waiting for or of whether he, or it,
and non sequiturs. The characters in Ionescos The Bald Soprano (1950) sit and talk,
repeating the obvious until it sounds like nonsense, thus revealing the inadequacies of
verbal communication. The ridiculous, purposeless behaviour and talk give the plays a
metaphysical distress. This reflects the influence of comic tradition drawn from such
sources as commedia dellarte, vaudeville, and music hall combined with such theatre
arts as mime and acrobatics. At the same time, the impact of ideas as expressed by the
Surrealist, Existentialist, and Expressionist schools and the writings of Franz Kafka is
evident.
Originally shocking in its flouting of theatrical convention while popular for its apt
expression of the preoccupations of the mid-20th century, the Theatre of the Absurd
declined somewhat by the mid-1960s; some of its innovations had been absorbed into the
mainstream of theatre even while serving to inspire further experiments. Some of the
chief authors of the Absurd have sought new directions in their art, while others continue
Chapter Three
The Birthday Party is an early play of Harold Pinter and is composed at a stage in his
career when the shadow of Beckett was looming large on him. If Waiting for Godot is the
benchmark for The Theatre of the Absurd, The Birthday Party definitely echoes and
responds to it. The absurdist traits in the play are both thematic and structural.
Thematically speaking, it deals with the radical dislocation of identity in a world where
language hardly communicates anything and is used more as a tool of menace e.g. the
interrogation of Stanley by Goldberg and Maccan. Pinter does not give us any
background information about his characters and this withdrawal leads to unknown
motivations behind the actions of the characters--a typical absurdist motif. The theme of
isolation and a recluse reiterate through the paly. Inverting the Godot-situation, Stan
seems to wait for the Didi-Gogo like pair in Goldberg and Maccan. The two as in Godot
in Beckett's play signify beyond everything else, a cynical obsession with the theme of
death. Even structurally, Pinter's use of Pause and Silence takes a cue from Beckett and
the breakdown of speech that Stanley faces at the end remains an absurdist motif of failed
8
in Stanley's interrogation shows a beyond to rationality. Their questions they ask are
literally absurd. Like Beckett in Godot, Pinter in Birthday Party, tantalizes us with
multiple symbolic openings as theoretical straitjackets to read the play (e.g. the religious
references, the Jewish and the Irish trope etc.) but collapses them all in an exceedingly
BIBLIOGRAPHY
"The Birthday Party Theater of the Absurd, an Introduction." Study Guides & Essay
"What Traits of The Theatre of the Absurd Do We Come across in the Play The Birthday