Theatrical Analysis of the Play ‘The Birthday Party’ by Harold Pinter

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aanchal Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Harold Pinter ◽  
Birthday Party

Harold Pinter, 1930–2008

2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-5
Keyword(s):  
Early Years ◽  
Harold Pinter ◽  
Birthday Party

The death of Harold Pinter on 24 December 2008, at the age of seventy-eight, has prompted an inevitable slew of respectful obituaries, and the facts about his life and opinions are available in plenty. Here, we print two personal recollections of Pinter's early years – from Charles Marowitz, who, as an editor of Encore magazine, saw The Birthday Party into print in 1959 while the play was still enduring critical scorn, and Simon Trussler, co-editor of NTQ, who published one of the first studies of Pinter's plays, and, with Marowitz, edited Theatre at Work (Methuen, 1967), which included the earliest lengthy interview with the playwright.

scholarly journals A Postmodern Allegory: Absurdity in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-17
Author(s):  
Nynu V Jamal
Keyword(s):  
Harold Pinter ◽  
Birthday Party ◽  
Theatre Of The Absurd

The Birthday Party is an absurdist play written by the British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor Harold Pinter. He is one of the most celebrated dramatists of the Theatre of the Absurd. The objective of the paper is to examine how Pinter’s play The Birthday Party incorporates the elements of an absurdist play. The paper also tries to explain how the fragility of language to communicate is being portrayed through the play.

scholarly journals Cringe Histories: Harold Pinter and the Steptoes

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Jonathan Bignell
Keyword(s):  
Extended Period ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Dramatic Works ◽  
Harold Pinter ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Birthday Party ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
Theatre Of The Absurd

This article argues that cringe humour in British television had begun at least by the early 1960s and derived from a theatre history in which conventions of Naturalism were modified by emergent British writers working with European avant-garde motifs. The article makes the case by analysing the importance of cringe to the BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son, tracing its form and themes back to the ‘comedy of menace’ and ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ emblematised by the early work of playwright Harold Pinter. The article links the play that made Pinter’s reputation, The Birthday Party, to dramatic tropes and social commentary identified in Steptoe and Son and in other British sitcoms with cringe elements. The analysis not only discusses relationships between the different dramatic works on stage and screen but also pursues some of the other connections between sitcom and Pinter’s drama via networks of actors and contemporaneous discourses of critical commentary. It assesses the political stakes of cringe as a comic form, particularly the failure of cringe to impel political activism, and places this in the context of the repeated broadcast of Pinter’s plays and episodes of Steptoe and Son over an extended period.

scholarly journals Comedy of Menace in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party Instructor: Basaad Maher Mhayyal

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (7) ◽  
pp. 47-64
Author(s):  
م. بسعاد ماهر محيل
Keyword(s):  
Communication Failure ◽  
Harold Pinter ◽  
Birthday Party ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Boarding House ◽  
Unique Style

Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1957) clearly portrays the condition of modern man where there is a real communication failure among the characters. Through this play, Pinter tries his best to reflect this fact. He uses a lot of pauses and silences, i.e., the usage of language is no more significant to modern man. Pinter considers silence to be more powerful than the words themselves. That’s why long and short pauses can be seen throughout all Pinter’s plays. Modern man has been living in a state of alienation. All the characters are isolated by their own desire not to communicate with each other and to lock themselves away from the world. They are unable to express their feelings. Therefore modern man has buried himself in life just like the character of )Stanley( in this play who has buried himself in the boarding house in an attempt to be away from his own society after being rejected as a pianist by the people of that society. The play deals with human deterioration and the process of death. The disaster in the play does not lie in the idea of death, but in the more terrible state of being dead in life, as in )Stanley(’s case, who hides himself in a room ceasing all his relationships with life outside. This paper deals with Harold Pinter as a well-known British playwright who has his own unique style that is called Pinteresque, his language, and how he uses silences and pauses in his play The Birthday Party. It consists of an abstract, Pinter’s comedy of menace, his play The Birthday Party, and a conclusion

scholarly journals Navigating the Mechanics of Secondary Imagination in the Select Works of Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 4337-4340
Keyword(s):  
Creative Writing ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Harold Pinter ◽  
Eugene Ionesco ◽  
Birthday Party ◽  
One Step ◽  
The Many ◽  
Conscious Will

The phrase “Science and Imagination”, in the most modern usage, has beckoned the interest of many critics across the globe to dwell on the many possible connections between the two conflicting concepts evoking myriad responses from social commentators. There are those who would dismiss the role of reason in imagination as the infringement of ethics in creative writing. Aesthetic imagination in creative writing perhaps demands going one step beyond the contours of reason to achieve what is artistically termed as the miraculous representation of reality. The juxtaposition of Science and Imagination is well explained in the words of Coleridge in Biographia Literaria as “To make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature_this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts”[223]. The confluence of science and imagination breaks down the seemingly opaque barrier between the heart and the head leaving the path open for the meeting and merging of intellect and emotion. The present paper works upon the ways by which the writers or artists of absurd literature, especially of drama, have used secondary imagination to recreate the experiences of their conscious will. The proposed paper titled “Navigating the Mechanics of Secondary Imagination in the Select Works of Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter” tries to explore the nuances of secondary imagination in Amedee or How to Get Rid of It and Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco and The Birthday Party and The Caretaker by Harold Pinter. The paper further intends to focus on how authors of absurd literature, like Ionesco and Pinter, reflect the futility and absurdity of human existence by making use of Secondary Imagination in their work

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document