The Birthday Party Questions and Answers
The Birthday Party
Why is the play The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter absurdist?
Absurdist drama is about the illogical nature of the world and its lack of meaning. The main character in The Birthday Party, Stanley Webber, is an unemployed pianist, but he asks Meg, who runs the...
The Birthday Party
Explain the character of Stanley Webber in Harold Pinter's play The Birthday Party.
Stanley Webber is a very mysterious man, and there’s an awful lot we don’t know about him or his background. This is a wholly deliberate strategy on Pinter’s part as he doesn’t want to give too...
The Birthday Party
How is The Birthday Party a comedy of menace?
The idea of the comedy of menace is closely associated with Harold Pinter. Pinter specialized in creating plays that are both ominous and humorous. His characters tend to inflict damage on each...
The Birthday Party
How is language used as a means of intimidation in Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party?
The play The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter features a pianist named Stanley Webber who lives in a seaside boarding house owned by an older couple named Meg and Petey Boles. Their day begins with...
The Birthday Party
How do Pinter's plays The Birthday Party and Celebration reflect the ethos of the time in which they were written? I...
As you say, the two plays were written at two very different historical moments. The Birthday Party was written in the late 1950s when the Cold War between the Western Bloc and the Soviet Bloc was...
The Birthday Party
How do Pinter's plays The Birthday Party and Celebration reflect the ethos of the time in which they were written?
You might like to consider the ways in which the themes of absurdism and isolation and loneliness stem from the contemporary political events that were occuring at the time. In The Birthday Party,...
The Birthday Party
What aspects of life in the 1950s does Pinter symbolize by the character of Stanley in "Birthday Party"?
The decade spanning the 1950s was a difficult time for Great Britain. The country was in a decline as a world power; its colonies were gaining their independence, it had lost control of the...
The Birthday Party
How do the characters Davies from The Caretaker, Stanley from The Birthday Party, and Max from The Homecoming all by...
In The Caretaker, Davies lodges with two brother, Mick and Aston. In the story, Davies is an unlikable character. He is equal parts bigot, braggart, and thug. This is how he deals with any...
The Birthday Party
How do I create a good summary of each act of this play and analyze it?
I would first decide how you want to structure your summary. You could either summarize the entire play by summarizing all three acts, and then write the analysis section after the entire summary,...