The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter

 Silence is used as an attack in Harold Pinter’s ‘The Birthday Party’  as there are many pauses between words and are as loaded as a gun.  Stanley lives with an older couple, their relationship is never defined, we gather that he is a guest that has become familiar with them and almost like a son.  Then two strangers arrive, strangers with dark intentions for Stanley as they have come to get him.

  Reasons have little place in a Pinter play and interpretation can often be fruitless.  It is absurdest and therefore what is important is the poetic image that forms on the stage rather than the layers of meaning that can become attached to it. 

  It is not Stanley’s birthday but yet the two strangers, Goldberg and McCann, throw him the party in another attempt to break Stanley’s defences down involving a tense game of blind man’s bluff.  Who are these strangers, what did Stanley do in his past becoming lodging in this B&B and what do any of them want?  All hinted at and unresolved, it’s a guessing game of a play, in this comedy of menace.  In a lot of ways the facts are unimportant, it’s the dramatic situation that interests us, it’s claustrophobic sense and it’s ever rising tension between the characters.

  One could say that it is a very English play but apparently it has very good responses in some parts of Eastern Europe where it plays out more like realism then absurdism.

  The interrogation sequence is a brilliant play on words that build and build up into a massive structure that eventually comes crumbling down.  The comedy of this play really helps to create tension and we laugh out of nervousness more than anything else.  Is this play about the cold war?  Is is about spies or inter-governmental politics?  Or is it what it is?  Interpretation is not necessary and in some ways that it makes a change for the audience being allowed to let it be just a dramatic piece without any consequential meaning.  That doesn’t mean that you can’t create meaning but just that you can equally enjoy it without having to put it through the interpretative mill.