I have a romantic affection for the theatre which was even warmer than usual last weekend when I went to see Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. Growing up in the seaside town of Folkestone, I wasn’t exactly immersed in culture. But we did have a summer repertory theatre which my father frequently took us to. Most of the plays at the Leas Pavilion Theatre were whodunnits and farces, but occasionally something more challenging was slotted in to the schedules.
I must have been barely a teenager or younger when I first saw The Birthday Party, but not being able to make head nor tail of it didn’t seem to be a problem. It was oddly compelling and I still vividly remember Stanley manically bashing his toy drum at the end of act one. I would later record the BBC’s 1987 Theatre Night production with Pinter himself as Goldberg and Joan Plowright as Meg on VHS. The tape got played several times, and each time I was still oblivious as to why it was so good.
I was primed not to ask too many questions about the play by the programme, which contained an anecdote I still remember and, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I can now verify. After seeing a production of the play, a woman wrote to Pinter:
“Dear Sir, I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your play The Birthday Party. These are the points which I do not understand: 1.Who are the two men? 2. Where did Stanley come from? 3. Were they all supposed to be normal? You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions I cannot fully understand your play.”
Pinter wrote back:
“Dear Madam, I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your letter. These are the points which I do not understand: 1.Who are you? 2. Where do you come from? 3. Are you supposed to be normal? You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions I cannot fully understand your letter.”
The desire to “interpret” literature can be very strong, often to the amusement or irritation of authors. Beckett famously resisted interpretation of Waiting for Godot, insisting that it should be appreciated as pure theatre and nothing more. A lot of The Birthday Party’s brilliance should be understood in these terms. There’s some brilliant humour, wonderful lines, intrigue and menace. It also has some unforgettable characters, which explains why the incredible Zoe Wanamaker, Toby Jones and Stephen Mangan have taken on roles for the current London production.
But I don’t think Beckett or Pinter’s plays have endured for their theatrical qualities alone. They do show something about “the human condition”. I say “show” rather than “say” because if it could be said you wouldn’t need a play to say it. A lot of great art is not about dramatising arguments or theses. It is rather an attempt to get us to attend more carefully to the world, to ourselves and see what perhaps cannot be as easily said.
You can give some sense of what is shown in mundane, non-fiction prose, but this always end up sounding much more trite and shallow than what you see. The Birthday Party, for example, is at least in part about political psychology. In Goldberg we have the mindset of a fascist bully, whose incoherent ramblings about getting to where he is today by being fit as a fiddle and indebted to his great grandmother reflect the visceral but logically incoherent appeals to tradition, strength and family of demagogues everywhere. If we do not understand why Stanley is his victim that is how it should be for there is no logical in the persecution of the weak other than that they are weak. Petey’s feeble attempt to intervene at the end speaks of the frailty and cowardice of most of us in the face of tyranny.
I think that interpretation is reasonable but reading it doesn’t give you what seeing the play does. I think that’s one reason why the theatre retains a magic for me, even though time never passes more slowly than when you’re sitting through a bad play. In philosophy we always try to spell things out as clearly and coherently as possible. That, however, is just one way to attend to the world, as the arts ineffably remind us.
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