The Birthday Party

Interpretation

Like many of Pinter's other plays, very little of the expository information in The Birthday Party is verifiable; it is contradicted by the characters and otherwise ambiguous, and, therefore, one cannot take what they say at face value. For example, in Act One, Stanley describes his career, saying "I've played the piano all over the world," reduces that immediately to "All over the country," and then, after a pause, undercuts both statements by saying "I once gave a concert."[21]

While the title and the dialogue refer to Meg's planning a party to celebrate Stanley's birthday: "It's your birthday, Stan. I was going to keep it a secret until tonight," even that fact is dubious, as Stanley denies that it is his birthday: "This isn't my birthday, Meg" (48), telling Goldberg and McCann: "Anyway, this isn't my birthday...No, it's not until next month," adding, in response to McCann's saying "Not according to the lady [Meg]," "Her? She's crazy. Round the bend" (53).

Although Meg claims that her house is a boarding house, her husband Petey, who was confronted by two men who "wanted to know if we could put them up for a couple of nights" is surprised that Meg already has prepared a room (23) and Stanley (being the only supposed boarder) also responds to what appears to him to be the sudden appearance of Goldberg and McCann as prospective guests on a supposed short holiday, flat out denies that it is a boarding house: "This is a ridiculous house to pick on...Because it's not a boarding house. It never was." (53)

McCann claims to have no knowledge of Stanley or Maidenhead when Stanley asks him "Ever been anywhere near Maidenhead?...There's a Fuller's teashop. I used to have my tea there...and a Boots Library. I seem to connect you with the High Street...A charming town, don't you think?...A quiet, thriving community. I was born and brought up there. I lived well away from the main road" (51); yet Goldberg later names both businesses that Stanley used to frequent connecting Goldberg and possibly also McCann to Maidenhead: "A little Austin, tea in Fuller's a library book from Boots, and I'm satisfied" (70). Of course, both Stanley and Goldberg could just be inventing these apparent reminiscences as they both appear to have invented other details about their lives earlier, and here Goldberg could conveniently be lifting details from Stanley's earlier own mention of them, which he has heard; as Merritt observes, the factual basis for such apparent correspondences in the dialogue uttered by Pinter's characters remains ambiguous and subject to multiple interpretations.[11][22]

Shifting identities (cf. "the theme of identity") makes the past ambiguous: Goldberg is called "Nat," but in his stories of the past he says that he was called "Simey" (73) and also "Benny" (92), and he refers to McCann as both "Dermot" (in talking to Petey [87]) and "Seamus" (in talking to McCann [93]). Given such contradictions, these characters' actual names and thus identities remain unclear. According to John Russell Brown (94), "Falsehoods are important for Pinter's dialogue, not least when they can be detected only by careful reference from one scene to another...Some of the more blatant lies are so casually delivered that the audience is encouraged to look for more than is going to be disclosed. This is a part of Pinter's two-pronged tactic of awakening the audience's desire for verification and repeatedly disappointing this desire" (Brown 94).[22]

Although Stanley, just before the lights go out during the birthday party, begins to strangle Meg (78), she has no memory of that the next morning, quite possibly because she had drunk too much (71–74); oblivious to the fact that Goldberg and McCann have removed Stanley from the house – Petey keeps that information from her when she inquires, "Is he still in bed?" by answering "Yes, he's...still asleep"––she ends the play focusing on herself and romanticising her role in the party, "I was the belle of the ball...I know I was” (102). For some, Petey’s final reply only makes dramatic sense if the framework of the whole play is in Meg’s mind, that her invention of Stan was necessary in an empty marriage, and what the audience has seen was a tragic possibility - no doubt to be followed by another narrative when her Stan arrives.

Meg and Petey Boles

While on tour with L. du Garde's A Horse! A Horse!, Pinter found himself in Eastbourne without a place to stay. He met a stranger in a pub who said "I can take you to some digs but I wouldn't recommend them exactly," and then led Pinter to the house where he stayed. Pinter told his official biographer Michael Billington,

I went to these digs and found, in short, a very big woman who was the landlady and a little man, the landlord. There was no one else there, apart from a solitary lodger, and the digs were really quite filthy...I slept in the attic with this man I'd met in the pub...we shared the attic and there was a sofa over my bed...propped up so I was looking at this sofa from which hairs and dust fell continuously. And I said to the man, "What are you doing here?" And he said, "Oh well I used to be...I'm a pianist. I used to play in the concert-party here and I gave that up."...The woman was really quite a voracious character, always tousled his head and tickled him and goosed him and wouldn't leave him alone at all. And when I asked him why he stayed, he said, "There's nowhere else to go."[23]

According to Billington, "The lonely lodger, the ravenous landlady, the quiescent husband: these figures, eventually to become Stanley, Meg, and Petey, sound like figures in a Donald McGill seaside postcard" (Harold Pinter 76).

Goldberg and McCann

Goldberg and McCann "represent not only the West's most autocratic religions, but its two most persecuted races" (Billington, Harold Pinter 80). Goldberg goes by many names, sometimes Nat, but when talking about his past he mentions that he was called by the names "Simey" and also "Benny". He seems to idolise his Uncle Barney as he mentions him many times during the play. Goldberg is portrayed as a Jewish man which is reinforced by his typically Jewish name and his appropriate use of Yiddish words. McCann is an unfrocked priest and has two names. Petey refers to him as Dermot but Goldberg calls him Seamus. The sarcasm in the following exchange evokes some distance in their relationship:

McCANN: You've always been a true Christian
GOLDBERG: In a way.

Stanley Webber

Stanley Webber — "a palpably Jewish name, incidentally — is a man who shores up his precarious sense of self through fantasy, bluff, violence and his own manipulative form of power-play. His treatment of Meg initially is rough, playful, teasing...but once she makes the fateful, mood-changing revelation —'I've got to get things ready for the two gentlemen'—he's as dangerous as a cornered animal" (Billington, Harold Pinter 78).

Lulu

Lulu is a woman in her twenties whom Stanley "tries vainly to rape" (Billington, Harold Pinter 112) during the titular birthday party at the end of Act II.


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