Bleak house

October 29, 1997
Issue 

The Birthday Party
By Harold Pinter
Directed by Michael Gow
With Ralph Cotterill, Jerome Ehlers, Sacha Horler, Gillian Jones, Colin Moody, Don Reid
Company B
Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, until November 30

Review by Allen Myers

The two entire back walls of Robert Kemp's set for The Birthday Party, from floor to second storey ceiling, are covered with drawers and cupboards, from which spill or ooze clothes, bits of furniture and occasional disquieting stains of some unnamed liquid.

Is this really the dining room of a boarding house? Why does it have only one "guest", Stanley, who pays no rent and who has done nothing for the past year but grow dirtier and more contemptuous of the proprietors, Petey and Meg?

But nothing is quite what it seems — or rather, quite what we are told. Harold Pinter's 1958 theatre of the absurd begins to unravel the very substance of theatre, language.

The unravelling begins with the banal — "Is that you, Petey?", Meg calls out, and is more than sufficiently answered by his silence — but soon proceeds to the menacing with the arrival of Goldberg and McCann, two avenging angels — or devils.

Never mind that neither Stanley nor the avengers are quite certain what sin they are avenging (and if they are devils, perhaps the offence was a good deed). If there is one thing clear, it is that Stanley's unlikely refuge is about to collapse in upon him. And what more appropriate mechanism for his undoing than a birthday party when it isn't his birthday?

If this all sounds terribly bleak, it isn't. Director Michael Gow keeps his cast always well balanced on a taut line stretched between the sense of brooding menace and belly laughs. Key to success here is the perfectly controlled performance of Gillian Jones as Meg, whose simple-minded cheerfulness bridges parts of a world that seems to be flying apart.

While not ostensibly a political play, The Birthday Party very much reflects the claustrophobic feeling of the early Cold War, when citizens who dared to think could only wonder whether destruction would come first from outside or from the McCarthyites of "their own" side. Pinter further twists perceptions by making Stanley's persecutors members of persecuted groups (Jewish and Irish).

The Cold War also had its own unravelling of the connection between language and meaning ("mutually assured destruction", "security" as a synonym for universal annihilation). The Birthday Party captures this excellently in the inquisitors' cross-examination of Stanley: "Why did you betray the organisation?" (which organisation?) and "Why did the chicken cross the road?" are equally threatening demands.

Though the play is almost 40 years old, this excellent production is still very topical. That is both a tribute to the fine performances and a commentary on how little the new world order differs from the previous version.

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