Prose

The Birthday Party, written by Harold Pinter, is a three act drama about a day full of inconsistent events which mentally break a man, Stanley Webber, down and forcefully taking him away from his abode.
The drama The Birthday Party presents to us an incongruous story that involves a few members of a society belonging to a seaside town. It takes place inside a boarding house run by Meg. Petey is her husband and a deck-chair attendant. The only boarder of the house is Stanley who is supposed to be a pianist. Lulu is a young girl who visits the boarding house sometimes. The story begins on a fated day when Petey brings news of two prospective boarders and this makes Stanley very nervous and anxious; and when they, Goldberg and McCann, come Stanley sneaks away from them, although later on he engages in a conversation with them but unfortunately it becomes an interrogation. They ask him a series of incomprehensible questions. Later that day, Goldberg proposes to arrange a birthday party for Stanley and Meg agrees to that. When the boarders leave for their room, Meg gives Stanley a birthday present. In the evening the party takes place. Lulu attends but Petey cannot as he has a chess game to go to. After that Meg gives a speech and everyone toasts for Stanley. But this birthday party soon turns into a terrible fiasco and everything goes wrong; when they started the game ‘old man’s buff’ Stanley attempts a rape on Lulu, Goldberg and McCann attack Stanley and this ends the party in a horrible state. The next morning Meg wakes up with a terrible headache and leaves for shopping. Goldberg and McCann suggest Petey that they will be leaving and taking a ‘mentally broken’ Stanley to a Monty. Petey abortively attempts to stop them but they, indeed, take Stanley away. Later, when Meg comes back, Petey lies to her about the whereabouts of Stanley and they go on with their humdrum conversation and the curtain falls to the story.
The drama does not have a plot; it does not tell us anything in particular; and the conversations and events lead us up to absolutely nothing. This drama is like a ‘nightmare’; an aberration of human psyche. Within the conversation the participants give no particular information apart from some allusive questions to men’s and God’s existence, some thousands of years old biblical dilemma, and twisted dark lies. The study of the drama drives the human nous to insanity. All these features point us to one particular direction- absurdity. Through these apparently meaningless strings of events and conversations Harold Pinter gives us the nature of the post-war, post-modern world, where no one cares for no one, everything is being done or said just because it is supposed to be done or said, the society is at its peril from moral degradation and over indulgent profligacy and hypocrisy; there is no doctrine to be followed, no faith either; the world has lost its purpose and sense of direction. W.B. Yeats appropriately initiates us to this world with his The Second Coming “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; /Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”. Therefore, Birthday Party is a drama belonging to the ‘absurd’ genre of English literature.