Customer Reviews

The Birthday Party & The Room: 2 Plays

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2 star:		(1)
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"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.

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.

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.

Harold Pinter's _The Birthday Party_:

A young man lives with his mother at a run-down boarding house near the beach. Two visitors come and shake things up. They don't do anything wild or unusual, but they question and intimidate the young man, until the reader becomes unsure what sinister plans the two men have in mind.

Pinter's strength lies in his dialogue, which is thoroughly believable and memorable. Not for a moment does the reader doubt that these scenes could happen (and may HAVE happened) in real life.

As this reader read the play, the tension built and built, as I became more and more sympathetic to the young man, awaiting to learn his fate, as his own will seemingly deteriorated.

I would agree that this play is a funny read, but it's certainly very unsettling as well.

If you haven't read anything by Harold Pinter, or are curious because you've read his other plays, _The Birthday Party_ is worth checking out.

ken32

The last line in the second play here, "The Room," features a character saying "Can't see. I can't see. I can't see." I felt the same way.

The two plays represent a kind of starting point for Harold Pinter, being his first published plays. These established the template for his "comedies of menace," and in fact come across on the page as variations on a theme. In the three-act "The Birthday Party" (1958), we meet a man living in a boarding house confronted by two shadowy characters who seem to know him. In the one-act "The Room" (1957), it is a woman in an apartment who is similarly confronted, by several figures who seem to want her room.

If you are one familiar with Pinter and value his plays for having a kind of elliptical, categorization-defying quality, these would seem solid choices to read. But if you are like me, an outsider to Pinter's world, you will find these hard going. Characters come and go randomly, saying odd things. Acts have a tendency to meander for a while before reaching a kind of intense pitch and sudden end. There's humor, but of a distinctly uncomfortable kind that suggests if you aren't laughing, it's maybe because the laugh's on you.

Characters were a key problem for me. If one is to care about anything that is happening in "The Birthday Party," you need to care a bit about the figure at its center, the hapless layabout Stanley. But he resolutely refuses to connect with anyone. The play's message of hopelessness begins with him, before we even meet the two shady characters who have serious, unexplained business with him. Are they mobsters from Stanley's prior life? Or are they supposed to represent a kind of malevolent Establishment, as some Pinter critics claim?

Give Pinter credit for not being direct in his answers. "The Birthday Party" does establish creative ambiguity, and even if the menace seems over-amped (Pinter refuses to even hint at what Stanley has done to deserve his situation), there are stray bits of recognizable humor, such as the doddering woman running Stanley's boarding house who rambles on about the corn flakes she serves for breakfast. While a long play, it moves fast.

"The Room" is much shorter. It just reads long. Here the meaning of things seems more abstract. Who is this woman and why do these people want her apartment? Who is the blind black man who walks in and what is he supposed to represent? Unlike "The Birthday Party," whose odd characters interact with one another in a humanly recognizable way, people in "The Room" seem entirely abstract constructs making some point about life's basic misery that never quite lands. You can't really just roll with the action on stage the way you can with "The Birthday Party," as Pinter seems at pains to point up the unnaturalness of what is going on.

It may just be that Pinter doesn't play as well on page as on stage, with a gifted troupe of interpreters lending his lines the right amounts of stress and rhythm. But I found the reading of these plays a bleak and confounding exercise I wouldn't wish on anyone unwarned.

A side splitting send up of the misunderstood artist.

One of the funniest plays of the century, by one of England's greatest playwrights.

Bring your knife and fork!