A Ride Into the Absurd

Only two of Harold Pinter’s plays had been produced in London before his speech at the 1962 National Student Drama Festival in Bristol, England. In 1960 “The Caretaker” ran for a year, successfully and without incident, but “The Birthday Party” ran for exactly one week in 1958. Though the Aurora Theatre revives “The Birthday Party” under the direction of Tom Ross until March 4, Pinter’s commentary from the festival still holds true: “Each play was, for me, ‘a different kind of failure.’” “The Birthday Party” is no exception.

Pinter’s plays are commonly called “comedies of menace,” which means that uninitiated audiences generally think they’re failures for the wrong reasons. “The Birthday Party” is a child of the Theatre of the Absurd, which explains why it feels like a plotless wonder. Like the rest of its ambiguous brethren, “The Birthday Party” defies convention without rejecting meaning, but it does make for a bumpy ride.

The narrative structure of the play is linear, but motivations are unexplained. The language is colloquial but incomprehensible in the context of onstage activity. Even as the lights dim in the final moments, certainty remains elusive.

Unanswered questions are left as evidence of life’s supposed fluidity. Identity is never confirmed, dates of birth and death are as reliable as the person you discuss them with, and any house can be a boarding house if you try hard enough. But underneath these specific interrogatives lies a much larger one, one Pinter seems to ask protagonist and failed pianist Stanley Webber (James Carpenter): Can one ever exist outside the realm of the acceptable?

Though the style of the piece leans toward a celebratory affirmative, the play’s conclusion seems to indicate otherwise, and therein lies the Pinteresque ambivalence of “The Birthday Party.” Although critics and spectators alike often feel a playwright owes the audience closure and resolution, Pinter has always rejected the idea of “message.” He said so in 1962: “To supply an explicit moral tag to an evolving and compulsive dramatic image seems to be facile, impertinent and dishonest.”

So what, then, can be made of “The Birthday Party,” a play that mocks those who would criticize its incoherence with the “I meant to do it” defense, an ever-present intellectual trump card that may have won Pinter the Nobel in 2005? No one would argue that engaging the spectator is a bad thing; the passively receptive audience member is both lazy and dangerous. But there’s an implicit contract between playwright and viewer, an exchange that promises three hours and $38 worth of artistic provocation along with some benefit, however small, for the audience. That’s where Pinter fails.

James Carpenter is a superb Stanley, disheveled and confused at the heart of a play that is disheveling and confusing. Michael Ray Wisely’s McCann has a depth that is interesting to watch and, sadly, a stark contrast to the other, less-evolved party guests. And though the production is sound, there’s something lacking, something critics and spectators alike noticed in 1958, something that was later obliterated by revisionism and reputation.

“The Birthday Party” induces laughter, the form alludes to freedom, but the content crushes liberation. And perhaps, if he espoused such things, this illusion of movement but reality of stillness would be Pinter’s message. But it’s a “facile, impertinent and dishonest” message to foist upon an audience without a chance for deliverance— because at the Aurora Theatre, salvation is exactly what “The Birthday Party” has received.

Raising the Fourth Wall

-Harold Pinter’s ‘The Birthday Party’ May Be a Classic, But After Nearly 50 Years, This Oft-Misunderstood Work is No Less Impenetrable

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