Name : Anjali M. Rathod
Enrollment no. : 4069206420220024
Roll no. : 02
Batch : M.A. Sem. 2 (2022-24)
Subject Code : 22403
Paper no. : 110 : History of English Literature from 1900 to 2000
Email Address: rathodanjali20022002ui@gmail.com
Submitted to : Smt. S.B. Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University, Bhavnagar - 364002
Birthday party as a Comedy of Menace
Introduction :
Born : 1930, London , England
Died : 2008 , London , England
Awards And Honors : Nobel Prize (2005)
Notable Works : “Moonlight”, “The Birthday Party”, “The Caretaker”, “The Dumb Waiter“, “The Homecoming” and “The Room”
Movement and Style : Theatre of the Absurd
Harold Pinter was an English playwright who gained international recognition as one of the most complex and challenging dramatists of the post-World War II era. He used understatement, small talk, and silence to convey a character's thoughts and feelings, which were often hidden beneath their speech. Pinter grew up in London's East End and studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before becoming a professional actor.
Harold Pinter began writing for the stage in 1956 and his early plays, such as The Room and The Dumb Waiter, established the mood of comic menace that would characterize his later works. Although his first full-length play, The Birthday Party, initially puzzled audiences and had a short run, it was later successfully revived on stage and adapted into a film. In 2005, Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Pinter's plays are complex and original, with ambiguous plots, characters, and endings. They often feature a pair of characters whose roles and relationships are disrupted by the arrival of a stranger. Through bizarre yet ordinary conversations, the characters' hidden fears, jealousies, sexual desires, and loneliness are revealed, causing their psychic stability to crumble. In The Caretaker, for example, an old tramp disrupts the lives of two neurotic brothers and upsets their delicate balance, leading to his eviction. The Homecoming portrays the return of a professor and his wife to his London home, where they encounter a web of rage and confused sexuality in an all-male household. The wife's acceptance of the family's sexual advances leads to her decision to stay with them, despite her husband's detachment. Despite the ambiguity, Pinter's plays are powerful and impactful works.
Dialogue is of central importance in Pinter’s plays and is perhaps the key to his originality. His characters’ colloquial (“Pinteresque”) speech consists of disjointed and oddly ambivalent conversation that is punctuated by resonant silences. The characters’ speech, hesitations, and pauses reveal not only their own alienation and the difficulties they have in communicating but also the many layers of meaning that can be contained in even the most innocuous statements.
About the Play :
The Birthday Party, drama in three acts by Harold Pinter, produced in 1958 and published in 1959. Pinter’s first full-length play established his trademark “comedy of menace,” in which a character is suddenly threatened by the vague horrors at large in the outside world. The action takes place entirely in a shabby rooming house where Stanley, a lazy young boarder, is shaken out of his false sense of security by the arrival of two mysterious men who proceed to “punish” him for crimes that remain unrevealed. A birthday party staged by Stanley’s landlady soon turns into an exhibition of violence and terror. Pinter’s comic vision of paranoia and isolation is reinforced by his use of dialogue, including frequent pauses, disjointed conversations, and non sequiturs.
Meaning of Comedy of Menace :
Comedy of menace is an audience's laughter is quickly followed by a sense of impending disaster. The play contains a sense of danger or violence, whether it is actual or potential, that permeates throughout. The exact cause of the menace is often unclear, but it produces a feeling of uncertainty and insecurity in the audience. The comedy element in the play is often used to highlight and intensify the sense of danger. Overall, a comedy of menace creates a unique and unsettling theatrical experience that blends humor with an underlying sense of fear.
The Birthday Party is a prime example of Pinter's Comedy of Menace, where a sense of danger and menace underlies the comic elements of the play. Pinter explores the existential view that danger is pervasive in life and cannot be escaped. The protagonist, Stanley, is suspected of having committed a serious crime and is on the run, which is implied through his behavior in the play. He rarely leaves his room and becomes agitated when he learns that two strangers will be staying at the boarding house. Stanley attempts to conceal his apprehension by bragging about his successful concert and a job offer. Pinter uses the juxtaposition of comedy and menace to dilute the comic appeal and emphasize the sense of danger that pervades the play.
Birthday party as a Comedy of Menace :
The theatre of Harold Pinter, however, is quite another matter. Pinter's theatre, to apply what Jacques Lemarchand said of Ionesco's theatre, is one of the strangest types of theatre to have emerged during the atomic age. It is certainly one of the most bizarre and unique to have emerged in the English language. The only other playwright whose plays seem similar in texture is Samuel Beckett, and his major plays were originally written in French.
Pinter's plays are frequently funny. They are also frequently frightening. Their meaning usually seems obscure. They are realistic plays, after a fashion, but not realistic in the sense that Roots or Look Back in Anger is realistic. The characters behave in a "believable" manner, but they are shrouded in a twilight of mystery. We are never precisely sure who they are, why they are there, or what they have come to do. Their motives and backgrounds are vague or unknown. We recognize that there is motivation, but we are unsure what it is. We recognize that there is a background, but that background is clouded. Each piece of knowledge is a half-knowledge, each answer a springboard to new questions. In The Room, it is never completely explained why a blind Negro named Riley comes to visit Rose Hudd, what his message to her means, or even why Bert Hudd, Rose's husband, kills him.
In The Birthday Party, we never really know why the strange visitors, Goldberg and McCann, intimidate Stanley or why they take him away with them. In The Caretaker, we do not know the precise relationship of the brothers or even the reasons for the younger brother's changing attitudes toward their visitor, Davies.
Pinter's plays have an unreal reality, or a realistic unreality. His symbols are unclear but pertinent, or pertinent but unclear. This description might make these plays seem dull and pretentious. But they are not: they are engrossing and exciting. A neoclassical critic would have no difficulty judging Pinter's theatre: "He does not write according to the Rules." Our currently fashionable phrases "These aren't plays: they're sketches for revues" or "I don't know what the hell this play is all about"-come to the same thing.
Pinter's plays seem to be produced by Maxim Gorky out of Charles Addams with Samuel Beckett as midwife. He has been called an egg-head Hitchcock, and his plays have given rise to a new label, "Comedy of Menace," a term which is appropriate, which explains little, but which serves as a convenient label for people who need labels. The plots of Pinter's plays are straightforward almost to the point of simplicity. A recounting of the plot of The Caretaker leads one to expect the type of treatment found in Kind Lady.
In The Birthday Party, Goldberg and McCann visit a lodging house in a seaside resort town, where they drive Stanley Webber, a lodger, to a nervous breakdown, and finally abduct him. In The Dumb Waiter, two hired killers, Gus and Ben, arrive in Birmingham to do a job. When Gus leaves to go to the lavatory. Ben receives instructions from someone talking to him on a speaking-tube, and Gus returns to find Ben pointing a gun at him. In The Room, a blind Negro named Riley has been waiting in the basement until Rose Hudd's husband Bert leaves for work. When Bert leaves, Riley tells Rose that her father wants her to come home. Bert returns and kills him.
Conclusion :
Overall of the play, Harold Pinter creates a sense of uncertainty and insecurity in the audience, which intensifies the feeling of menace. The comedy element of the play is used to juxtapose the underlying sense of danger, creating a unique and unsettling theatrical experience for the audience. In summary, The Birthday Party is a brilliant example of Pinter's ability to create a perfect balance between humor and menace in his plays.
Works Cited :
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Harold Pinter". Encyclopedia Britannica, 24 Mar. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harold-Pinter. Accessed 31 March 2023.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "The Birthday Party". Encyclopedia Britannica, 10 Nov. 2015, https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Birthday-Party-play-by-Pinter. Accessed 31 March 2023.
Dukore, Bernard. “The Theatre of Harold Pinter.” The Tulane Drama Review, vol. 6, no. 3, 1962, pp. 43–54. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1124934. Accessed 31 Mar. 2023.
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