The Birthday Party & The Room: 2 Plays [Paperback]

Harold Pinter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1971

In The Birthday Party, a musician who escapes to a dilapidated boarding house becomes the victim of a ritual murder in which everyone- assassins, victim, and observers- implacably plays out the role assigned him by fate.The Room, a derelict boarding house again becomes the scene of a visitation of fate when a blind Black man suddenly arrives to deliver a mysterious message.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (April 1971)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394172329
• ISBN-13: 978-0394172323
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,258,383 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pinter's First Play, Absurdity Rules!, July 4, 2009

By 

John F. Rooney - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Birthday Party & The Room (Paperback)

"The Room" (1957) was Harold Pinter's first play, a one act piece, and it demonstrates some of the Absurdist features we grew to know so well: the seemingly aimless conversation, the sense of menace, dread, and terror, real violence or lurking violence, the Pinterian pauses, the feeling that we are in alien territory dealing with characters who don't seem to be in control of their destinies.
Of course none of us is in control of his or her destiny, but in this play Rose doesn't know if the room is still hers, who her landlord is, and who are the strange people who enter the room and seem to be attempting to control her life. Is Mr. Kidd the landlord? If he is, he doesn't know how many floors the house has. Rose asks him questions; he evades answering them or doesn't comprehend.
The stranger Riley calls her Sal, and says she is wanted at home. She's puzzled; we're puzzled, and that's part of what Pinter is saying--we live in an existential world in which we operate and wait for we know not what.
Pinter took his cue from Samuel Beckett and brought his audience into new territory where the norms of behavior were altered, into a world of questions without answers. But Pinter the artist was able to create an alternative world in which his plots intrigue us, his dialogue has its own beauty and majesty, and his characters fascinate us.
Pinter changed the audience's expectations, shook them out of their usual theater-going habits and made them think. He made them anxious, antsy with his skittish people in his edgy plays. Rose says, "Who did bring me into the world?" Why, Pinter did, of course.
Rose Hudd talks endlessly in the beginning, and her husband Bert says nothing. It's cold and damp, and he has to take the van out. When he comes back he talks briefly about his trip and savagely confronts a stranger, and Rose ends up transformed.
Pinter often used the enclosure of a single room: human beings were caged in, caught in a claustrophobic situation. The play seems slow-moving yet a great deal happens. Great portent is conveyed quite quickly. He's a shock and awe artist.
There's always the possibility Pinter is toying with us, seeing what he can get away with, seeing if his quirky stuff will go over, conning us.
I have reviewed "The Birthday Party" elsewhere on Amazon.

4.0 out of 5 stars Superb, December 1, 2011

By 

JSmalls - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Birthday Party & The Room (Paperback)

I really enjoy Harold Pinter's works. They're often hard to discern meaning from, but the dialogue is always solid and I find myself thinking about what I've read or seen long after the final page or curtain. He delivers great lines and situations in "The Birthday Party," he gives readers his most famous work.

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Birthday Party, March 13, 2001

By 

Gunnar Bell Gundersen (Norway) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Birthday Party & The Room (Paperback)

The Birthday Party is a very good play about a young man and his inevitable and perhaps unavoidable fate. The plot is quite simple, yet it is also elegant in its simplicity. Without saying too much, the story is about a young man who has been living for some time in a beach-sited boarding house owned by a mid-aged couple. These characters lives' are invaded by two men who for some unknown reason want to catch the young man. The story evolves...

The play is captivating and exciting, at some points also downright scary. Pinter has obviously used techniques of how to seize the attention of an audience, something a reader will surely experience. The incertainty and unease that fills the story is highly credible, as one easily can identify the feelings that fills you when something sudden, dangerous and unavoidable happens to you.

I think Pinter perhaps has found inspiration in other authors works. As I read it, I came to think on Hemingways short story "The Killers" and the sense of utter despair of Kafka's "The Trial". Please do not shoot me should you disagree..

As a play, one recognizes elements that characterize most great playwrights, both classical and modern, due to its "actor-friendliness" and room for interpretation.

Recommended, indeed.

And one last thing to Ken (The reviewer): Unless you follow the idea that Meg has a brain-disfunction, She is definitely not Stanleys mother.