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“RANDOM DOTTINESS”...
gritty, “kitchen sink” drama that featured young, frustrated and entrapped
characters in down-at-heel domestic settings. While The Birthday Party
was not compared explicitly to Osborne’s play, Pinter and the other writers
later termed the “Angry Young Men” or the “New Wave” benefited from an
expectation of experiment and challenge.
The other plays that the reviewers of The Birthday Party would mainly
have seen in 1958 were much like those in which Pinter appeared as a
professional actor in a touring theatre company. Agatha Christie’s country
house murder mystery The Mousetrap opened in 1952 and played to full
houses for decades thereafter. In 1956 it was another play set in a well-to¬
do country house, Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden, that was the most
successful production in London." In 1958 Agatha Christie had two more
plays on the London stage, The Verdict and The Unexpected Guest, both of
which dramatized the moral struggle of middle class characters who have to
murder invalid spouses to escape domestic entrapment. Structurally, if not in
its language and rhythm, Pinter’s play looked in some ways like well-crafted
plays by Somerset Maugham and Terence Rattigan. It is set in a room and
features a household whose family structures, domestic balance of power and
relationship with outsiders are used to work through ideas about hierarchies
of class, race and gender, and the condition of post-war British society. In
1958, critics were unsure whether Pinter was one of those writers aping the
European avant-garde’s critique of the communicative potential of language
and eschewing moral and psychological pronouncements. But they were also
unsure whether the victimization and abduction of Stanley from a grubby
boarding-house was a version of the tense, domestic crime story genre, albeit
one that lacked either jokes or plot resolution. Pinter’s biographer, Michael
Billington, sums up the contemporary reactions to the play by calling it
“gloriously uncategorizable.”””
The first performance had been on a Friday, and Pinter read the reviews
published the next morning. He and his wife, the actress Vivien Merchant,
left London and went to a country village in the Cotswolds. They bought the
Sunday newspapers next morning, and fortunately these contained a single
enthusiastic review by the influential critic Harold Hobson in the Sunday
Times. He had been to the Thursday matinee, where there were seven other
people in the audience, one of whom was Pinter himself. Hobson defended
the play at length:
4 Lib Taylor: Early Stages: Women Dramatists 1958-68, in T. Griffiths - M. Llewellyn-Jones
(eds.): British and Irish Women Dramatists since 1958, Buckingham, Open University, 1993,
9-25.
2 Michael Billington: Harold Pinter, London, Faber, 2007, 86.
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