Harold Pinter's career was nearly strangled at birth. On Monday May 19 1958, The Birthday Party opened at the Lyric Hammersmith. After a devastating set of overnight reviews, it was hastily withdrawn by its producers, Michael Codron and David Hall, on the Saturday night. Yet, almost 50 years to the day, Pinter's play is to be revived by David Farr at the same theatre. But why were the initial reviews so antagonistic? And what is it about Pinter's play that has enabled it to endure? If one could only answer those questions, one might discover something about the vexed relationship of critic and artist and the volatility of modern society.
What is clear is that Pinter himself was almost destroyed by the reviews. Buoyed by the initial success of The Room at Bristol University in May 1957, he sat down to write The Birthday Party that summer while touring in Doctor in the House. "I remember," says Pinter, "writing the big interrogation scene in a dressing room in Leicester." The omens for The Birthday Party also looked good. It attracted a first-rate director in Peter Wood, who had just done a dazzling revival of The Iceman Cometh. On a brief pre-London tour that took in Cambridge and Oxford, the play was rapturously received by undergraduate audiences and perceptive critics. The Oxford Mail invoked Hemingway and Eliot, and the Oxford Times described it as "brilliant, baffling and bizarre - Kafka, almost, spiced with humour". Then came Hammersmith.
"The morning after the first night," Pinter told me recently, "I went to a cafe in Chiswick High Road, ordered a coffee, and sat down and read all the papers. I was shattered. I thought there and then that I'd give up writing plays and concentrate on novels and poetry. I came back to our flat and said to my wife, Vivien, 'I'm giving up the whole bloody business. What's the point?' Vivien, to her credit, replied, 'Don't be ridiculous. Just go on.' Then, as soon as the play closed on the Saturday, we went to stay at a guesthouse in a Cotswold village called Painswick, near Cheltenham. We went out to buy the Sunday papers and, although Kenneth Tynan in the Observer was lukewarm, I read this extraordinarily appreciative review by Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times that bowled me over. Around the same time, an actor friend, Patrick Magee, contacted a BBC radio producer, and said, 'You've got to give this man a job, since he's about to give the whole thing up.' As a result, I got a commission and wrote A Slight Ache - which, by a neat piece of timing, is going to be revived by the National this autumn."
Pinter's career was saved by a loyal wife, a visionary critic, a sympathetic friend and the BBC Third Programme. But why did The Birthday Party provoke such hostility from the daily critics? Today, there seems nothing strange about its plot, in which a truculent loner, Stanley, is terrorised by two visitors to a seaside boarding-house, Goldberg and McCann, and ultimately carted off. At the time, however, the reaction was one of bewildered hysteria. The cryptically initialled MWW in the Manchester Guardian wrote of characters who "speak in non sequiturs, half-gibberish and lunatic ravings". The anonymous Times critic was equally bemused: "after a while we tend to give the puzzle up in despair". Derek Granger in the Financial Times claimed the play belonged to "the school of random dottiness deriving from Beckett and Ionesco". And WA Darlington in the Daily Telegraph sympathised with the character of a depressed deckchair attendant. "Oh well," wrote Darlington, "I can give him one word of cheer. He might have been a dramatic critic, condemned to sit through plays like this."
What shines through all the reviews is a baffled anger at Pinter's failure to explain himself. Who is Stanley? What do Goldberg and McCann signify? And what is the mysterious "organisation" they represent? The persistence of these questions tells us a lot about the culture of the late 1950s, in which works of art were still expected to provide rational answers to clearly defined questions. Examine the popular novels of the period - such as John Braine's Room at the Top, Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and CP Snow's Strangers and Brothers sequence - and you find they are working within an essentially realistic framework: one in which there are solutions to social and professional issues. And even though drama had supposedly been "revolutionised" by Waiting for Godot and Look Back in Anger, this turns out to be a comforting myth. Theatre had, in many ways, been beneficially liberated by Beckett and Osborne; but, as I've argued in my book State of the Nation, many of the old forms and customs remained intact.
For proof, you need only look at the context in which The Birthday Party appeared in May 1958. In the previous month, critics had been confronted by drawing-room comedies and thrillers with titles like Breath of Spring, Not in the Book, Something to Hide and Any Other Business. Two weeks before Pinter's play opened, Rattigan's Variations on a Theme had also offered a conventional update of Dumas's La Dame aux Caméllias. Significantly, the most formally daring and thematically adventurous play of the preceding weeks, Ann Jellicoe's The Sport of My Mad Mother at the Royal Court, had been greeted with an uncomprehending hostility that matched that of The Birthday Party. In short, there was no "revolution" in the late 1950s, merely a process of gradual change.
The reaction to The Birthday Party also proves something else: that the visionary artist is always ahead of the critics and, to some extent, the public. There is a consistent pattern in postwar theatre in which ground-breaking works are greeted with initial incomprehension. It happened with John Whiting's Saint's Day in 1954, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1955, The Birthday Party in 1958, John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance in 1959 and Edward Bond's Saved in 1965. What is surprising about The Birthday Party is that, even if it leaves much unexplained, it still boasts familiar landmarks. It has a traditional three-act structure. It is also full of mystery and suspense.
David T Thompson, in his invaluable book Pinter: The Players' Playwright, traces the influence of Pinter's acting career on his later work: in the case of The Birthday Party, he cites the example of Mary Hayley Bell's The Uninvited Guest, in which Pinter played, at Colchester in 1955, a refugee from an asylum who undergoes sustained interrogation. This residual memory is transformed by Pinter's dark imagination. But I am reminded of a remark made by the German director Peter Zadek that what he enjoys in Pinter is "the mix of Agatha Christie and Kafka". And The Birthday Party's current director, David Farr, makes a similar point when he says that Pinter "blends existential modernism with British realism and pragmatism". In that lies the real key to The Birthday Party's survival capacity: it is set in a seaside boarding-house and opens the door to European history.
Pinter is notoriously reluctant to analyse his own work. But, when I ask him why The Birthday Party has endured, he offers both a political and personal explanation. "It's possible to say," he tentatively admits, "that two people knocking at the door of someone's residence and terrorising them and taking them away has become more and more actual in our lives. It happens all the time. It's happening more today than it did yesterday, and that may be a reason for the play's long life. It's not fantasy. It just becomes more and more real.
"Thinking back to my own life, I also hadn't forgotten my own experiences as a conscientious objector 10 years earlier. I had two tribunals and trials and expected to go to prison. I was saved only by my father paying the fine. But I remember being defiant at the time. No one wanted me to be a conscientious objector. My parents certainly didn't want it. My teacher and mentor, Joe Brearley, didn't want it. My friends didn't want it. I was alone. That was the point. Whatever his vices and failings, Stanley represents that spirit of defiance. He's not a passive victim waiting to be destroyed, but someone who puts up a fight. In that sense, the play derives from my own experience."
In the end, that is what makes The Birthday Party so unsettling: it combines the structure of a rep thriller with the guilt mechanisms of Kafka's The Trial and a deeply felt rebellion against what Pinter, in a much-quoted letter to Peter Wood, called "the shit-stained strictures of centuries of tradition". The identity of the oppressors is also crucial to the play's political meaning. I put it to Pinter, and he readily agreed, that if it were Smith and Jones, rather than Goldberg and McCann, who came through the door, the play would not work. Having forsaken religion at the age of 13, Pinter represents through Goldberg the patriarchal aspects of Jewish orthodoxy; and, having worked extensively in Ireland as an actor in the 1950s, he makes McCann an example of an oppressive Catholicism. But, in Pinter's richly ambivalent world, the oppressors are themselves victims of larger forces.
The ultimate paradox of The Birthday Party is that the same words will be spoken on the stage of the Lyric Hammersmith in 2008 as in 1958, yet they will have acquired new meaning. Our response to the play now is, in fact, informed by multiple factors: our knowledge of Pinter's politics; our love of drama that avoids narrative resolution; our awareness of intimidation techniques that continue up to, but certainly won't end, with Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Virginia Woolf saw a shift in human sensibility in the early years of the 20th century. I would argue that an equally profound one has taken place in the past 50 years, and that we respond more readily to art that is finally unresolved, inexplicable and mysterious.
Not the least part of that shift lies in our willing embrace of popular culture; and David Farr makes a shrewd point when he suggests that The Birthday Party both unconsciously absorbed and has directly influenced that culture. "Pinter," says Farr, "reminds me of early Truffaut in his ability to lend a popular plot existential meaning: you see it in a work like Truffaut's Shoot the Pianist which, given Stanley's own background, might be an apt title for Pinter's play.
"Yet, when John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson turn up at the start of Pulp Fiction there are direct echoes of The Birthday Party, and there's a Steven Spielberg film, Minority Report, which shows, like Pinter's play, that punishment may precede the crime and that you are accused before you've actually done anything."
Farr's point is well made. It also confirms that Pinter's enduring, ultimately undefinable play, which left the critics floundering in 1958, has the power of all first-rate art to acknowledge the past and reflect the future while existing in the tangible present. The Birthday Party is at the Lyric Hammersmith, London W6, from May 8 to 24. Box office: 0871 221 1729.\
'What it all means, only Mr Pinter knows . . .'
How critics saw The Birthday Party in 1958, selected by Maddy Costa
The author never got down to earth long enough to explain what his play was about, so I can't tell you. But I can give you some sort of sketch of what happens, and to whom.
To begin with, there is Meg, who lets lodgings in a seaside town. She is mad. Thwarted maternity is (I think) her trouble and it makes her go soppy over her unsavoury lodger, Stanley.
He is mad, too. He strangles people. And I think he must have strangled one person too many, because a couple of very sinister (and quite mad) characters arrive, bent on - I suppose - vengeance ...
The one sane character is Meg's husband, but sanity does him no good. He is a deeply depressed little man, a deckchair attendant by profession. Oh well. I can give him one word of cheer. He might have been a dramatic critic, condemned to sit through plays like this.
WA Darlington, Daily Telegraph, May 20
At the end of the third act of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party . . . a young girl flounces out of a seedy boarding-house, where she has narrowly escaped strangulation - but not seduction - with the words, "I know what you're doing. I've got a shrewd idea." Here Lulu, for that is her name, has an unfair advantage, for although the author must have explained his play to the cast, he gives no clues to the audience . . . What [it all] means, only Mr Pinter knows, for as his characters speak in non sequiturs, half-gibberish and lunatic ravings, they are unable to explain their actions, thoughts or feelings. If the author can forget Beckett, Ionesco and Simpson, he may do better next time.
MWW, Guardian, May 21
Harold Pinter's first play comes in the school of random dottiness deriving from Beckett and Ionesco ... The message, the moral, and any possible moments of enjoyment, eluded me.
Apart from a seaside ticket-collector and a bare-legged floozy, all the characters seemed to me to be in an advanced state of pottiness or vitamin deficiency, and quite possibly both at once.
Derek Granger, Financial Times, May 2
The writing contains some effective and even witty non sequiturs, which have led several critics to compare Mr Pinter with NF Simpson. The analogy breaks down in one vital respect. Mr Simpson uses a surrealist technique to say things that could not be said in any other way. Mr Pinter employs a similar technique to say something that could easily be said in many other ways; has, indeed, often been said in them: for the notion that society enslaves the individual can hardly be unfamiliar to any student of the cinema or the realistic theatre. That is why Mr Pinter sounds frivolous, even when he is being serious; and why Mr Simpson is serious, even when he sounds frivolous.
Kenneth Tynan, Observer, May 25
I am willing to risk whatever reputation I have as a judge of plays by saying . . . that Mr Pinter, on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London.
Theatrically speaking, The Birthday Party is absorbing. It is witty. Its characters . . . are fascinating. The plot, which consists, with all kinds of verbal arabesques and echoing explorations of memory and fancy, of the springing of a trap, is first-rate. The whole play has the same atmosphere of delicious, impalpable and hair-raising terror which makes The Turn of the Screw one of the best stories in the world.
Mr Pinter has got hold of a primary fact of existence. We live on the verge of disaster . . . There is terror everywhere. Meanwhile, it is best to make jokes (Mr Pinter's jokes are very good), and to play blind man's buff, and to bang on a toy drum, anything to forget the slow approach of doom. The Birthday Party is a Grand Guignol of the susceptibilities.
The fact that no one can say precisely what it is about, or give the address from which the intruding Goldberg and McCann come, or say precisely why it is that Stanley is so frightened of them, is, of course, one of its greatest merits. It is exactly in this vagueness that its spine-chilling quality lies. If we knew just what Miles had done, The Turn of the Screw would fade away. As it is, Mr Pinter has learned the lesson of the Master. Henry James would recognise him as an equal.
Harold Hobson, Sunday Times, May 25
Mr Pinter is a natural dramatist. He has a quick sense of the stage. He can write theatrically acute dialogue. The trouble is that he has been quite unable to clarify his play. He may hold that it does not need clarification; that it is the duty of an alert listener to catch every nuance, unravel every thread, accept every suggestion. If so, then I admit my dire failure . . .
The Birthday Party is bewildering without being especially enjoyable . . . Mr Pinter has insisted on a beginning, a middle, and an end. Chronologically, I suppose, they are in the right order. Otherwise, all I can add is that your guess about the play's significance is as good as, if not better than, mine.
JC Trewin, Illustrated London News, May 31
