The Birthday Party Play by Harold Pinter

 

The Birthday Party

Play by Harold Pinter

This task given by Yesha Ma'am. In this blog I embed our video about this task in which we are going to recreate Act 2 in an Indian context.

About Harold Pinter

(10 October 1930,24 December2008)

Harold Pinter was a British playwright, Screenwriter, director, and actor. He was considered as one of the most renowned dramatists of the 20th century, esteemed for his inventiveness, originality, and formal innovation. His work is so influential that his name has been used to explain certain settings or situations the "Pinter Pause" concerns relying on unsaid things to convey characters' motivations or personalities, and the effect named  "Pinteresque" refers to an inconclusive end to a comedy of subtle menace and absurdity.

 His work was influenced by Samuel Beckett, whom Harold Bloom identified as Pinter's "ego ideal."

He wrote his first play, The Room, in 1957. It features many motifs that would be common in his oeuvre, including a situation that seems quotidian but is charged with ambiguity and menace. It was reviewed favorably and was mounted by the drama department of Bristol University. Pinter then went on to The Birthday Party, a play of muted anxiety and tension that bordered on the theater of the absurd. This play soon produced at Cambridge's Arts Theatre to critical success. The play bombed during its London debut a few months later. Despite that failure, The Birthday Party remains one of Pinter’s most successful full-length plays, and it is considered the first of his “comedy of menace” pieces.

Pinter  also wrote many plays in the 1970s, his many earlier works were more than enough to cement his reputation. This decade saw Old Times (1970), No Man's Land (1975), and Betrayal (1978). He was the associate director for Britain's National Theater.

In the 1980s-2000s, He continued to compose plays but also tried his hand at poetry, screenwriting, and directing. He explained that he wanted to look at politics at the end of his life, and he remarked that his twenty-nine plays were enough. In 2005, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

The Birthday party

'The Birthday Party' is Harold Pinter’s second full-length play; it was written in 1957. The male protagonist of this play is Stanley Webber. Stanley is the only guest at Meg and Petey’s guesthouse. He becomes perturbed when he is told that new people are coming to stay. His Life at a rundown seaside boarding house is disrupted by the unexpected arrival of two mysterious and sinister strangers called Goldberg and McCann, who terrorize him and eventually take him away.

When The Birthday Party was first staged at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1958, at that time most of the reviews were  negative and the play closed early. The exception was Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times, who believed in the play and championed Pinter. Fifty years later, the play’s anniversary production was staged at the Lyric Hammersmith. 

Goldberg and McCann claim that Stanley has suffered a nervous breakdown, and the play ends with them taking him away. Petey makes an attempt to stop them, but they threaten him too.

Irving Wardle famously described the play as ‘a comedy of menace’, while Pinter’s biographer, Michael Billington, calls the play ‘a cry of protest’.

Recreate Act 2 in indian Context

We recreate act 2 in which we take a scene when McCann returns with some bottles, which he sets down on the sideboard. Stanley again insists they should leave that house, but this time, Goldberg and McCann respond aggressively, insisting Stanley sit down. McCann insists forcefully, but it is Goldberg's quiet, threatening tone that effectively inspires Stanley to acquiesce.

After some time they  begin to interrogate Stanley with a series of both unnerving and seemingly unrelated questions, Stanley gets frustrated and screams loudly. This play has been classified as a comedy of menace, characterized by Pinteresque elements such as ambiguous identity, confusions of time and place, and dark political symbolism, and that's why we create this video with many Hindi memes which create many confusions, and also we can find some dialogues where no such meaning.

Here is link of our video which we made in indian context.

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