Sometimes the critics get it wrong.
Full disclosure: I happen to think Harold Pinter is the finest dramatist in the modern English-speaking theatre. "The Birthday Party" is his finest play. And, while I hate lists of the "most" or the "best" or the "greatest," I must succumb to my belief that it is the second most important modern play after Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie."
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| Pinter, shortly before his death in 2008. |
As for drama critics, while I like and appreciate some of them as useful evaluators of popular culture and some as solid, even brilliant writers, (particularly Rich and Brantley of the
NY Times),
many
inevitably just don't get it, as they didn't with "The Birthday Party" in its first production. It's fascinating to see the earliest reviews of the play now that it's recognized as a modern classic.
Here are a excerpts from the major reviews of the 1958 premiere.
Selected by Maddy Costa
"The author never got down to earth long enough to explain what his play was about, so I can't tell you. But I can give you some sort of sketch of what happens, and to whom.
To begin with, there is Meg, who lets lodgings in a seaside town. She is mad. Thwarted maternity is (I think) her trouble and it makes her go soppy over her unsavoury lodger, Stanley.
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Patrick Magee as McCann
in the 1968 film version
|
He is mad, too. He strangles people. And I think he must have strangled one person too many, because a couple of very sinister (and quite mad) characters arrive, bent on - I suppose - vengeance ...
The one sane character is Meg's husband, but sanity does him no good. He is a deeply depressed little man, a deckchair attendant by profession. Oh well. I can give him one word of cheer. He might have been a dramatic critic, condemned to sit through plays like this."
WA Darlington, Daily Telegraph, May 20
"At the end of the third act of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party . . . a young girl flounces out of a seedy boarding-house, where she has narrowly escaped strangulation - but not seduction - with the words, "I know what you're doing. I've got a shrewd idea." Here Lulu, for that is her name, has an unfair advantage, for although the author must have explained his play to the cast, he gives no clues to the audience . . . What [it all] means, only Mr Pinter knows, for as his characters speak in non sequiturs, half-gibberish and lunatic ravings, they are unable to explain their actions, thoughts or feelings. If the author can forget Beckett, Ionesco and Simpson, he may do better next time."
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Robert Shaw's brilliant performance
as Stanley in the 1968 film directed by
William Friedkin from Pinter's screenplay. |
MWW, Guardian, May 21
"Harold Pinter's first play comes in the school of random dottiness deriving from Beckett and Ionesco ... The message, the moral, and any possible moments of enjoyment, eluded me.
Apart from a seaside ticket-collector and a bare-legged floozy, all the characters seemed to me to be in an advanced state of pottiness or vitamin deficiency, and quite possibly both at once."
Derek Granger, Financial Times, May 25
 |
Sheila Hancock and Justin Salinger
in the Lyric Hammersmith UK
50-year revival in 2008. |
"The writing contains some effective and even witty non sequiturs, which have led several critics to compare Mr Pinter with NF Simpson. The analogy breaks down in one vital respect. Mr Simpson uses a surrealist technique to say things that could not be said in any other way. Mr Pinter employs a similar technique to say something that could easily be said in many other ways; has, indeed, often been said in them: for the notion that society enslaves the individual can hardly be unfamiliar to any student of the cinema or the realistic theatre. That is why Mr Pinter sounds frivolous, even when he is being serious; and why Mr Simpson is serious, even when he sounds frivolous."
Kenneth Tynan, Observer, May 25
 |
Ron Boussom, the finest Stanley
I've ever seen in a 1971 production
at South Coast Rep..As the director,
I am of course hopelessly biased. |
Among the few who understood -- that Pinter was a major new talent who embraced an entirely original form of playwriting which sounded an ominous warning about the perilously thin ice on which our post-war society was foundering -- was Harold Hobson of the London Times.
"I am willing to risk whatever reputation I have as a judge of plays by saying . . . that Mr Pinter, on the evidence of this work, possesses
the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London.
Theatrically speaking, The Birthday Party is absorbing. It is witty. Its characters . . . are fascinating. The plot, which consists, with all kinds of verbal arabesques and echoing explorations of memory and fancy, of the springing of a trap, is first-rate. The whole play has the same atmosphere of delicious, impalpable and hair-raising terror which makes The Turn of the Screw one of the best stories in the world.
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Pinter in a newspaper interview in 1958,
after London critics savaged the play. |
Mr Pinter has got hold of a primary fact of existence. We live on the verge of disaster . . . There is terror everywhere. Meanwhile, it is best to make jokes (Mr Pinter's jokes are very good), and to play blind man's buff, and to bang on a toy drum, anything to forget the slow approach of doom. The Birthday Party is a Grand Guignol of the susceptibilities.
The fact that no one can say precisely what it is about, or give the address from which the intruding Goldberg and McCann come, or say precisely why it is that Stanley is so frightened of them, is, of course, one of its greatest merits. It is exactly in this vagueness that its spine-chilling quality lies. If we knew just what Miles had done, The Turn of the Screw would fade away. As it is, Mr Pinter has learned the lesson of the Master. Henry James would recognise him as an equal."
Harold Hobson, Sunday Times, May 25
I am calling Mitt's friends at Bain Capital immediately. They can step in, buy the company, fire the workers and completely automate it. Surely this will lower costs. This viscous, heartless attack on the very core of the American enterprise junk food industry shall not stand. You will have to rip the Twinkies and Ho Hos from my cold dead hand.
