By Mattie Roquel Rydalch
Did you know...The Birthday Party almost killed Harold Pinter's career?
It's true. Check this out.
In 2009 I wrote a huge (it was huge to me) essay on a few Pinter plays, and while I was doing research for that, I read an article about Pinter’s play The Birthday Party, which today is often considered to be one of the most important and influential plays in Western theatre). Here’s the source of the article I read.
Billington, Michael. “Fighting talk.” The Guardian, Saturday 3 May 2008.
The article was written prior to Harold Pinter’s death in December of 2008. Let me tell you what this article said about The Birthday Party nearly ruining Pinter’s playwriting career. You’ll pee your pants! Well, maybe not, but you’ll probably feel at least a tingle.
According to Billington, The Birthday Party opened on a Monday in 1958, and the producers pulled it that Saturday because the critics were confused as all-get-out. Pinter nearly quit being a playwright over it. He nearly stuck to writing novels.
WA Darlington, Daily Telegraph, May 20, 1958: “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.” MWW, Guardian, May 21, 1958: “…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.” Kenneth Tynan, Observer, May 25, 1958: “The message, the moral, and any possible moments of enjoyment, eluded me.” JC Trewin, Illustrated London News, May 31, 1958: “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” (Billington).
Pinter told Billington, “‘The morning after the first night [of the play] […] 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?’” (Billington). This was only the second play Pinter wrote. Keep in mind that this person was later a Nobel prizewinning playwright. This is the moment where he almost quit before it ever happened.
And why did his play get such a crummy review?
Billington wrote, “Pinter is notoriously reluctant to analyse his own work. 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 […] and you find they are working within an essentially realistic framework: one in which there are solutions to social and professional issues. […] Theatre had, in many ways, been beneficially liberated by Beckett and Osborne; but […] 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” (Billington).
It seems Pinter was excited about the play, and this could have added to his disappointment. “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’” (Billington).
Looking back on the incident, Billington surmises that “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 […] Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1955, The Birthday Party in 1958 […] 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 (Billington)”. After reading this, I can't help but wonder if after the current conflict ends there will be plays that are met with confusion at first and revered later. I wonder who will write them. I hope it’s people who aren’t already winning Tonys and Pulitzers. I hope it’s “regular” people.
Though the newspaper writers were confused when the play was first staged, Billington is able to analyze elements of the play. “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” (Billington). I wonder: Could the ability to analyze The Birthday Party have evolved since its first production?
Billington seems to think so. “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” (Billington).
Interestingly, not all reviews of The Birthday Party In 1958 were negative. Harold Hobson with the Sunday Times was able to see what Pinter was trying to do with the play.
May 25, 1958: “‘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 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’” (Billington).
Just a side note about that: I’ve read James' The Turn of the Screw, and now that I look back on it, I think if I didn’t know it was written prior to Pinter, I might have described it as “Pinteresque.”
In the past, I've given up on my work too easily—it’s less complicated to just throw a script away and move on to another one—but I think from reading this article I’ve learned that although sometimes things don’t work the first time, second chances can’t hurt. Whoever produced The Birthday Party after it flopped was probably taking a risk, but in the end, it helped an important work of theatre to survive and thrive. Many thanks to whoever that was, and many thanks to Michael Billington, Harold Pinter, and to you (the reader).
Now go write something.
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