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3.45 AVERAGE
3.45 AVERAGE
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Like the characters within the play itself, I’m not sure I have much of substance to say about The Birthday Party. Not that I disliked it or thought it unremarkable—on the contrary, I liked it very much and found Pinter’s style fascinating. It’s a mystery and a maze of unrelenting atmosphere, fairly conventional in its three-act, single-setting structure, but remarkably dense when you consider how defiant it is in disallowing the audience to ever gain access to its secrets. From what I’ve read on my own time, Pinter’s métier was something akin to a cloak-and-dagger absurdist banality: he presents us with a world that is a logical possibility replete with characters who could very well exist outside of the text, but a world that usurps the conventional systems of meaning so that they can be manipulated to the point where significance and purpose is troubled or disappears entirely. By the end, it’s not enough to ask about the what of meaning, because Pinter is just as concerned about the why of meaning, the how, the where and the when. Why do we expect the presence of meaning in a given text? How is meaning attained, where can it be found, and when is it most salient? Therefore, his ultimate aim with plays such as The Birthday Party was, I think, not to sit on a complacent question like “What does this mean?” Rather, he framed his work based on something slightly more radical: “What does this mean when it doesn’t mean?”
That is not to suggest that The Birthday Party is meaningless per se. We know that it’s about a highly-strung lodger at a seaside boarding house who is visited by two mysterious men because of some sort of past grievance or sin he committed involving an organization. Said lodger loses his mind after the men interrogate and demean him on the evening of his birthday party, even though it may not be his birthday. The next day, the men take him away as a passive and inarticulate shell. That is as much as we are allowed to know. Almost everything else is obfuscated, contradicted, elided and rendered uncertain. Since we can only figure meaning in what is knowable (in this instance, verifiable by the progression of the plot), we are only left with a sliver of understandability—an understandability which is itself tenuous, for we can never have a firm sense of the characters or their actions. Outwardly, there is so little that “means” that it is no wonder critics savaged the play when it first opened in 1958. However, as I already mentioned in the preceding paragraph, these critics were asking the wrong question. The takeaway from questions that demand meaning will be minimal if meaning is clearly not at hand. By reorienting such questions by considering the absence of meaning, however—by asking, “What does this mean when it doesn’t mean?”—one is far more likely to appreciate Pinter’s craft.
What does the “doesn’t mean” question, well, mean? If we grant that The Birthday Party is a work wherein the meanings of motivations, actions, characterizations, etc. are either unknowable or severely limited, we must then ask ourselves why and how this is so. When that is answered, we can then proceed to ask why this lack of meaning matters and why Pinter would want it this way. The answer to the first question is not too difficult to suss out: what limits meaning is language itself. This is because Pinter is not content with language as give-and-take. It is not enough for dialogue to flow freely and equally between parties as we take it to do so in the conventional sense. Language, instead, must be punctured, flaunted, flouted and utilized insidiously because it is a device of power and possession rather than a communiqué of meaning. It is not interested in mundane exposition; rather, it is a weapon that can empower or destroy. That is why we are given exchanges that baffle due to non sequiturs and ambiguities for the purpose of psychological torture; exchanges that jostle with one another for dominance and relevance because each speaker wants the biggest share in the power dynamic; and exchanges that hint but never reveal because revealing was never the goal in the first place. It could even be argued that words here are nothing more than conditioned, automatic responses to the stimuli in the play’s environment, and as such, they exist to effect certain behaviours rather than to exercise meaning. If there is meaning in the fullest sense of the term, it hides beneath the silences that have become so characteristic of Pinter’s work. It is only when language ceases completely that meaning exists, but because silence yields no definitive knowledge and thus has no concrete interpretation, this meaning cannot be defined. It exists nebulously, for while we are aware that silence serves a purpose in the play’s world, little else about it can be grasped with certainty.
If The Birthday Party embraces its non-meaning, what does this signify? Is Pinter completely embracing the absurdist doctrine by implying that, in postwar Britain, meaning has become nothing more than an unattainable illusion? Or perhaps, when one considers the way in which he uses language, he is suggesting that the idea of “meaning” has been repurposed—that it can only relate to observable interactions that, whether or not they make sense, at least have the capacity to define behaviour in some tangible way? For tangible seems to be the key word in the equation. It seems that tangibility gives us the knowledge and certainty we need for meaning, and if words lose their semantic depth and instead become tangible tools of selfishness and destruction, perhaps their effect as such is the only real meaning to be counted on. And, in that, perhaps that is the only meaning that we can count on from The Birthday Party, for we never will know the truth about Stanley’s past, the truth about his relationship to Meg, the truth of Goldberg’s reminiscences, the truth about the organization or Monty… or anything outside of what these people do and say to each other. We can only make do with what we have.
That is not to suggest that The Birthday Party is meaningless per se. We know that it’s about a highly-strung lodger at a seaside boarding house who is visited by two mysterious men because of some sort of past grievance or sin he committed involving an organization. Said lodger loses his mind after the men interrogate and demean him on the evening of his birthday party, even though it may not be his birthday. The next day, the men take him away as a passive and inarticulate shell. That is as much as we are allowed to know. Almost everything else is obfuscated, contradicted, elided and rendered uncertain. Since we can only figure meaning in what is knowable (in this instance, verifiable by the progression of the plot), we are only left with a sliver of understandability—an understandability which is itself tenuous, for we can never have a firm sense of the characters or their actions. Outwardly, there is so little that “means” that it is no wonder critics savaged the play when it first opened in 1958. However, as I already mentioned in the preceding paragraph, these critics were asking the wrong question. The takeaway from questions that demand meaning will be minimal if meaning is clearly not at hand. By reorienting such questions by considering the absence of meaning, however—by asking, “What does this mean when it doesn’t mean?”—one is far more likely to appreciate Pinter’s craft.
What does the “doesn’t mean” question, well, mean? If we grant that The Birthday Party is a work wherein the meanings of motivations, actions, characterizations, etc. are either unknowable or severely limited, we must then ask ourselves why and how this is so. When that is answered, we can then proceed to ask why this lack of meaning matters and why Pinter would want it this way. The answer to the first question is not too difficult to suss out: what limits meaning is language itself. This is because Pinter is not content with language as give-and-take. It is not enough for dialogue to flow freely and equally between parties as we take it to do so in the conventional sense. Language, instead, must be punctured, flaunted, flouted and utilized insidiously because it is a device of power and possession rather than a communiqué of meaning. It is not interested in mundane exposition; rather, it is a weapon that can empower or destroy. That is why we are given exchanges that baffle due to non sequiturs and ambiguities for the purpose of psychological torture; exchanges that jostle with one another for dominance and relevance because each speaker wants the biggest share in the power dynamic; and exchanges that hint but never reveal because revealing was never the goal in the first place. It could even be argued that words here are nothing more than conditioned, automatic responses to the stimuli in the play’s environment, and as such, they exist to effect certain behaviours rather than to exercise meaning. If there is meaning in the fullest sense of the term, it hides beneath the silences that have become so characteristic of Pinter’s work. It is only when language ceases completely that meaning exists, but because silence yields no definitive knowledge and thus has no concrete interpretation, this meaning cannot be defined. It exists nebulously, for while we are aware that silence serves a purpose in the play’s world, little else about it can be grasped with certainty.
If The Birthday Party embraces its non-meaning, what does this signify? Is Pinter completely embracing the absurdist doctrine by implying that, in postwar Britain, meaning has become nothing more than an unattainable illusion? Or perhaps, when one considers the way in which he uses language, he is suggesting that the idea of “meaning” has been repurposed—that it can only relate to observable interactions that, whether or not they make sense, at least have the capacity to define behaviour in some tangible way? For tangible seems to be the key word in the equation. It seems that tangibility gives us the knowledge and certainty we need for meaning, and if words lose their semantic depth and instead become tangible tools of selfishness and destruction, perhaps their effect as such is the only real meaning to be counted on. And, in that, perhaps that is the only meaning that we can count on from The Birthday Party, for we never will know the truth about Stanley’s past, the truth about his relationship to Meg, the truth of Goldberg’s reminiscences, the truth about the organization or Monty… or anything outside of what these people do and say to each other. We can only make do with what we have.
blew me away, so appallingly funny but left me with a knot in my stomach and a feeling of despair. I think I need to sit with this play for a while
Plot: The birthday party like any Pinter story is always a little bit hard to follow. The basic plot looks at the characters of Meg and Stanley. Stanley is a guest in Meg and Petey‰ЫЄs bed and breakfast and there appears to be a form of an affair between Meg and Stanley, with Meg constantly trying to seduce Stanley. The plot focuses largely around a party thrown for Stanley when two new gentlemen entre the hotel. There is a lot of the sense of the unknown and this can make it appear quite hard to read and makes you uncertain to what is happening. My initial decision to about what occurred in the play is that the men are from Stanley‰ЫЄs past here to set Stanley straight and this is done with threatening him and make him reach a mental breaking point. However, there are multiple interpretations of the play.
Characters: The characters all appear to have a hidden past and lots of un-shown details which I feel if you watched the plays you may be more likely to see the development of the characters and the depth to which they truly have in the past. Pinter often shows his characters as interacting immaturely towards one and other or the interactions they show do not show much details about the character meaning not much character development, in my opinion.
Favourite aspects: The game within the birthday party was really interesting to see, it was an odd image that it created in my head and this would be really interesting to see how it would be portrayed in the theatre.
Structure: The first and third act are both set in the living/kitchen area of the B ‰Ычn‰ЫЄ B creating a cyclical nature to the play, both starting with the interactions of Meg and Petey however the relationships of the other characters are changed and therefore could suggest that Meg and Petey will always remain the same despite who stays at the hotel. The middle scene of the birthday party can be seen more as a serial scene. Being brought back straight into the realism of life.
Characters: The characters all appear to have a hidden past and lots of un-shown details which I feel if you watched the plays you may be more likely to see the development of the characters and the depth to which they truly have in the past. Pinter often shows his characters as interacting immaturely towards one and other or the interactions they show do not show much details about the character meaning not much character development, in my opinion.
Favourite aspects: The game within the birthday party was really interesting to see, it was an odd image that it created in my head and this would be really interesting to see how it would be portrayed in the theatre.
Structure: The first and third act are both set in the living/kitchen area of the B ‰Ычn‰ЫЄ B creating a cyclical nature to the play, both starting with the interactions of Meg and Petey however the relationships of the other characters are changed and therefore could suggest that Meg and Petey will always remain the same despite who stays at the hotel. The middle scene of the birthday party can be seen more as a serial scene. Being brought back straight into the realism of life.
3.5/5
As much as I hate absurdist theater, as much as I like the plays. It's a very strange dilemma.
As much as I hate absurdist theater, as much as I like the plays. It's a very strange dilemma.
I'm wholly confused by this, but somehow still enjoyed it.
3.5 stars. I enjoyed this play, but there was so much ambiguity that I wasn't used to in the typical style of plays I read. It's interesting though, and I can't wait to see it performed.
4/5 stars
Trigger Warning: Attempted r*pe
That was the most absurd thing I have ever read...
Trigger Warning: Attempted r*pe
That was the most absurd thing I have ever read...
challenging
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated