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JONATHAN BIGNELL Milton Shulman of the Evening Standard complained that witnessing this play resembled an attempt "to solve a crossword puzzle where every vertical clue is designed to put you off the horizontal,” and he predicted, “It will be best enjoyed by those who believe that obscurity is its own reward.”’ He wondered whether it was a comedy but decided that it was “not funny enough.” Derek Granger, in the Financial Times, wrote: “Harold Pinter’s first play comes in the school of random dottiness deriving from Beckett and Ionesco and before the flourishing continuance of which one quails in slack-jawed dismay.”® Granger saw Beckett and Ionesco as reference-points that his readership would recognize, but from whom he expected his readers to recoil. What he most disliked was the sense that the play had no apparent point to make: “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.” Granger’s was not the only review to compare Pinter to Beckett, and Beckett played an important role in this story not so much by a direct relationship as by the association of Pinter’s name with a known Beckett “brand.” References to Beckett were explicitly used in reviews of The Birthday Party to sum up what was wrong with it. The Guardian's reviewer, identified as “MW W,” complained that 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, lonesco and Simpson, he may do better next time.’ Both Beckett and Pinter, at this historical moment, were shorthand for obscurity, foreignness, and perversity.!° There was a British theatre culture strongly influenced by continental European writing, alternative to the British tradition embodied by Terence Rattigan’s or John Whiting’s plays, and the major London productions just preceding The Birthday Party included Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1955 and Ionesco’s The Lesson and The Bald Prima Donna in 1956, each written by authors based in Paris. The other key comparator is John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, first performed in 1956, which became the paradigm for 7 Milton Shulman: Sorry Mr Pinter, You’re Just Not Funny Enough, Evening Standard, 20 May 1958, 6. Derek Granger: Puzzling Surrealism of The Birthday Party, Financial Times, 20 May 1958, 3. ° MWW: The Birthday Party, The Guardian, 21 May 1958, 5. 10 Dan Rebellato: 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama, London, Routledge, 1999, 147. + 64 +
