The Birthday Party
by Harold Pinter
From 16th February 2004
To 21st February 2004
Description
Stanley Webber’s quiet hiding place at a small seaside boarding house is disrupted when two mysterious visitors arrive. Goldberg, the loquacious inquisitor, and McCann, his Irish henchman. But what do they want? Who do they want?
Harold Pinter’s classic play manages to combine both hilarity and horror to startling effect. His ability to draw the audience in, whilst leaving many questions unanswered, is the key to this unsettling masterpiece. Written in 1958, The Birthday Party was Pinter’s first full length play. In his review of the production, Harold Hobson, the Sunday Times critic, famously said "Mr Pinter, on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London."
Directors Notes
The first performance of The Birthday Party was on the 28th April 1958 at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, and the first London performance was at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith on the 19th May. The reviewers of the daily papers unanimously rejected the play and it closed after a week’s run. Total receipts for the week were: £260 11s 8d!
However, in the Sunday Times of 25th May Harold Hobson, usually acknowledged as the greatest theatre critic of his day, came to the defence of The Birthday Party in a review as prophetic as it is enlightening:
‘Mr Pinter has got hold of a primary fact of existence. We live on the verge of disaster….. There is something in your past - it does not matter what - which will catch up with you. Though you go to the uttermost parts of the earth, and hide yourself in the most obscure lodgings in the least popular of towns, one day there is a possibility that two men will appear. They will be looking for you and you cannot get away. And someone will be looking for them, too. There is terror everywhere…..The fact that no one can say precisely what it is about, or give the address from which the intruding Goldberg and McCann come, or say precisely why it is that Stanley is so frightened by them is, of course, one of its greatest merits. It is exactly in this vagueness that its spine-chilling quality lies.’
The rest is history………