The Birthday Party
Feb 8, 2018. Harold Pinter Theatre
Most people warned me about The Birthday Party — it’s obscure they said, its incomprehensible they said. Not at all. I loved it.
This is a starry revivial of a Pinter piece that is 60 years old this year. Has it aged well? Does it work? All hotly debated in the press. I think it does; the themes it explores are universal and still relevant. Bullying, mental illness, anger, loneliness.
Stanley (marvellously subtle Toby Jones) is holed up in a run-down boarding house by the sea. — it’s on the list so the landlady thinks she’s fully respectable in spite of the peeling wallpaper and unappealing breakfasts. We’re not sure on his backstory — he plays piano but has no job and no prospects of one. He seems to be hiding but what from. He doesn’t wash, he doesn’t go out, he has an odd relationship with his landlady Meg(marvellously meek Zoe Wanamaker).
She is lonely. Probably once a beauty with dreams beyond her reality, married to a man who runs the deck chairs on the local beach. The couple appear to be childless. She dotes on Stanley treating him like her young son. He allows her to and then rebels when she gets too close. It’s uncomfortable and you wonder why he’s still there being subjected to these infantile scenes.
Then in walk two strangers Goldberg and McCann. Dark suits, big car, menacing smiles. They are looking for Stanley but we never know how they know him, what they’re after or why they’re here. They join the preperations for Stanley’s birthday party using this as a front for their ulterior motive to remove Stan from the house (again to go where and why we don’t know). Mangan shines as Goldberg — is he east-end gang land? is he a relative? is he a wronged friend? Who is he?
He’s a horrible character, menacing, controlling. He uses language as a weapon and seems to be able to make every smile he makes sinister. He uses his physical size to impose on others and to ruthlessly get what he wants. Mangan is having a ball with this part. At one point at the end of the second half I actually thought he was aging before me — the lighting made him look haggard after the events of the party. Quite an astonishing effect for lighting.
There is so much unsaid that allows you to complete the backstories. I loved this. Pinter is treating his audience like grown ups, he trusts us to figure it out. And acted by such a stellar cast under the experienced direction of Ian Rickson, this is a gem.
4.5/5 Classic Pinter and it’s Mangan’s night.
