The Birthday Party

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...

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 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 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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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,...