The Birthday Party

Harold Pinter (1930-2008) had an extensive career as an activist and as one of the most significant English playwrights of the 20th century. The Birthday Party, his first full-length play, was first performed at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge in 1958, under the direction of Pinter himself. The play toured to positive reviews, landing on the West End in London with a different director the following month, where reception was significantly chillier.

The Birthday Party closed after a week because audiences and reviewers were perplexed by the play, with the notable exception of Harold Hobson of the Sunday Times, who praised Pinter for his rare and disarming insight into existential precarity. The Birthday Party defies categorization into traditional genres of comedy, tragedy, or even tragicomedy. The characters speak to each other in pleasantries that are frequently vaguely threatening. Certain moments might draw laughter or pity, but the ending is ambivalent. Another critic applied the label “Comedy of Menace,” which stuck as an apt description of Pinter’s plays, particularly his early work.

The Birthday Party is often considered absurdist—a type of play where the plot is nonsensical, the characters can’t connect with each other, and language is slippery and ineffectual.