This year marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, and the sixtieth anniversary of the difficult stage birth of his first full-length drama, The Birthday Party. The play centres around the indolent, unemployed character of Stanley Webber, a supposed former concert pianist, who has made his home in a seaside boardinghouse run by the flirtatious and maternal Meg and her husband, the pragmatic Petey. This establishment is visited by two resolute characters, Goldberg and McCann, who represent some authoritarian organisation and who are tasked with pacifying the resistant Stanley and taking him away to face his unnamed responsibilities.
The Birthday Party was Pinter’s first play to be staged in London. He was 27 when it opened at the Lyric Hammersmith in May 1958, after a short stint at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge. His first piece for the stage, the one-act The Room, had been produced at the University of Bristol just the year before, so to have his London debut was a significant development in the young writer’s fledgling career. The production, though, was met with a brutal critical drubbing that was so severe the theatre pulled the show within the week rather than play to near-empty houses (just six people turned up to the Thursday matinee). Accused of writing ‘random dottiness’, Pinter’s immediate career prospects looked bleak.
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