The Birthday Party

Birthday Party, The

    Author: Harold Pinter

    First Performance: 1958, Cambridge, England

    Published: 1959; rev. 1965

    Genre: Drama in 3 acts

    Setting: Boarding house on the south coast of England, 1950s

    Cast: 4m, 2f

Petey Boles, a deckchair attendant, and his wife Meg run a seedy boarding house, which has only one lodger, Stanley Webber. Stanley, who cruelly teases Meg, claims that he was once a talented concert pianist whose career ended when he was ‘carved up’ by the nameless ‘them’. Unexpectedly, two new guests arrive: Goldberg, a smooth-talking, expansive Jew, and his younger companion, a nervous Irishman, McCann. Stanley is disturbed by their arrival, and when Meg gives him a toy drum for his birthday to compensate for his lack of piano, he begins to bang it savagely. That evening, as they wait for the...

[The entire page is 352 words long]

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