The Birthday Party: A Play in Three Acts

One of my daughter’s favorites!

Got what i expected!

Everything went great!

I read this in college and really enjoyed it, so it was nice to find it again.

In "The Birthday Party" sixtyish batty Meg and husband Petey live in a past-its-prime British seaside resort and run a seedy boarding house which has only one guest, a strange loner named Stanley whom Meg has grown too fond of. Two mysterious ill-boding strangers, Goldberg and McCann, show up and decide to give Stanley a birthday party when it isn't even his birthday. Lulu is a young neighbor who visits and regrets it. A toy drum becomes a disquieting prop.Pinter, child of Beckett, sets up a bizarre situation. All of the people are weird, kooky, save Petey, and their behavior becomes grotesque. The party goes badly awry and gets into scary territory.This is early Pinter, not top-drawer, in which he is groping his way toward the Pinteresque theater of the Absurd. He toned down his antics in some of his later, better works like "The Homecoming."A Pinter play frequently presents:1. Round-the-bend, barely functional, often disreputable characters living on the fringes of society, some criminal types2. Commonplace, prosaic dialogue that is often funny, satiric, inane and Absurdist3. A sense of nameless terror and menace, pending violence, a mystery, the surreal, and the unexpected4. Often the motivation of some characters is unclear. We see people who are barely able to make it. Are they dumb, out of it, or puppets on a string?Pinter keeps you interested by the plot. Where is he leading me? Why are these people doing these things? Nothing seems earthshaking You step into his askew world and you're asking for trouble, and if you're adventurous, you are enjoying being toyed with. Part of the charm of Pinter are his enigmatic plots. They're fun because he's going to tease you, to make you wonder. This is a clever play, funny, off-beat and Absurdist, but not really much else. He's showing off, proving that he can pull off a stunt, but does it take a master dramatist just to play games? In this 1958 play one can see touches of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Albee's 1962 classic. Pinter was extremely influential.

'The Birthday Party' was first presented by Michael Codron and David Hall at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, on 28 April 1958 with the following cast:Petey Willoughby GrayMeg Beatrix LehmannStanley Richard PearsonLulu Wendy HutchinsonGoldberg John SlaterMcCann John Stratton.Stanley Webber is visited in his boarding house by two strangers, Goldberg and McCann. An innocent seeming birthday party for Stanley turns into a nightmare.

needed it for a class, thank you!

If you see this play as symbolic, you will probably enjoy it more than if you expect everything to tie together. Stanley has been staying in a basic boarding house where he seems to be the only guest. On a day which might or might not be his birthday two men arrive (one Jewish, apparently, one Irish) to stay overnight — and, although he is unsure as to whether he has had previous contact with the Irish one before —Stanley seems to be the reason they arrived. The actions in the play seem more and more menacing but hints, some of them contradictory, are given more freely to the audience than facts. So if you want a clear plot and clear ending you will be frustrated. But if you want something which resembles your own life — in that you have to guess a lot of the time and will never find out for sure about some things — then The Birthday Party will be illuminating for you. Most of the play seems remarkably fresh despite it arriving at its own 60th birthday party this year (2017). But one could imagine that the women (rather used and abused, and a bit silly) would be written differently if Pinter were at his desk now.

The book condition was great, just as described. No marks, tears or writing.However, the play itself is a bit dull. I love some good ambiguity and tension but I thought that this was very repetitive so it lost the effect and it became almost annoying, personally but my friend disagrees. You can see the characters relationships clearly and they are very simple, Pinter has done a great job especially as he didn't explore the characters in his planning but wrote them as he went.This is mostly a play review now.

Ordered this as I couldn't access my university library and it came exactly the same as the library copy. Great for studying Pinter.

This play was bought for my english Literature A-Level, as part of my wider reading. I bought it for a discount price on Amazon, and was amazed by how quickly it came. It was also in fantastic condition, which was a bonus!As a play, it says a lot about a little, but it's also very simple to read and understand the basic plot. Pinter is a brilliant writer to bulk up your wider reading with - I would recommend it to anyone.