The Pinter conundrum

The Birthday Party is among Pinter’s earliest and strangest works. It deconstructs the conventions of a repertory thriller but doesn’t bother to reassemble them. The setting is a derelict seaside town on the south coast. Petey, a thick deckchair attendant, runs a guest-house with his ageing wife, Meg. She’s a zero-IQ cook whose signature dish is a slice of white toast charred in fat. They have one resident, Stanley, a former pianist whom Meg cossets and mothers like a substitute son. Enter two London thugs, Goldberg and McCann, who invite Stanley to a party as a pretext to punish him for unknown misdemeanours. The whisky-soaked celebrations involve a game of blind man’s bluff during which Stanley’s glasses are smashed, rendering him sightless. The evening ends in confusion with an attempted strangulation, a possible rape and an obscure off-stage torture session. Next day the thugs carry Stanley away for medical treatment, or so they claim.

This muddled play failed to please audiences when it first appeared and its status as ‘a masterpiece’ makes it tricky to produce even now. Parts of the script are more trouble than they’re worth. Luckily, the director Ian Rickson knows where they are and how to deal with them. McCann’s annoying habit of tearing newspapers into strips is played down. So is Goldberg’s temporary identity crisis in the second half. The long interrogation scene, often regarded as the most disturbing passage in all Pinter, is nothing more than a repetitive and humourless chunk of verbal slapstick. Here the actors rattle through it in double-quick time.

And then there’s the business with the drum. At the close of the first act, Meg presents Stanley with a child’s drum as a substitute for the piano he can no longer play.