The Birthday Party Study Guide

Harold Pinter was raised in London, the only son of Jewish parents of Polish origin. After the German bombardment of the city in 1940 and ’41, the Pinters fled London, an experience that the playwright’s biographer claims profoundly affected his later work. In 1948, Pinter attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for just two terms before leaving to work as a professional actor touring the United Kingdom. After several years of doing this, he began to write plays in the mid-fifties, eventually penning The Room, which premiered as his first piece in 1957. Only a year later, he produced his first full-length play, The Birthday Party, and though it originally confounded audiences, it was well-reviewed and has gone down in history as a successful and influential work. Since then, he established himself as one of the critical writers associated with the Theatre of the Absurd, and eventually won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005. He died of liver cancer three years later, shortly after acting in a production of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.

Since The Birthday Party is intentionally set in an isolated and self-contained world, the play itself doesn’t reference any specific historical events. Rather, Pinter focuses on charting the deterioration of an individual in isolation while also showing the dangers of giving oneself over to people like Goldberg and McCann, who have come to collect Stanley on behalf of an unnamed “organization.” This plot enables Pinter to subtly comment on the hysteria that besieged the United States during the 1950s—a hysteria that came to be known as McCarthyism. This term refers to the republican senator Joseph McCarthy, who incited widespread fear in the US regarding the possibility of communist subversion, despite the fact that there was little evidence suggesting this might happen. As such, Goldberg and McCann’s insistence upon taking Stanley away for an unspecified crime echoes the accusations of treason that ran rampant throughout the ’50s.

Because of its engagement with the notion of guilt as ever-present and seemingly inherent to the human condition, The Birthday Party is similar to Kafka’s unfinished novel, The Trial, which examines the ways in which its protagonist, Joseph K., gets swept up in a vague accusation and subsequent persecution. Similarly, The Birthday Party also owes tribute to the Biblical book of Genesis, which traces guilt and transgression all the way back to Adam and Eve and their failure to adhere to God’s command, which ultimately gave birth to the idea of original sin and, thus, atonement. Lastly, the play bears similarities to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which—like The Birthday Party—refuses to fully reveal its characters’ backstories and motivations, instead reveling in absurdity and meaninglessness.