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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-todo 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. s 65 e
