Actions that a Man Might Play: Pinter's The Birthday Party

Actions that a Man Might Play: Pinter's The Birthday Party MICHAEL W. KAUFMAN ALTHOUGH HAROLD PINTER has been writing for the theatre for more than fifteen years, his achievement is still vet:y much in question. The reasons for this uncertainty are complex, and to a large extent the complexity stems from the plays themselves: from the carefully contrived ambiguities that refuse to offer ultimate coherence; from the minimal plots, adumbrated characters, and the multiplicity of inferences his dramatic actions excite. Early in his career Pinter acknowledged Kafka and Beckett as the major influences in his treatment of plots and characters. But perhaps even closer in spirit to Pirandello, Pinter exhibits the same contempt for absolute Truth and Reality. He can speak of the real and the unreal in an almost Pirandellian manner as indistinguishable,I and he has specifically emphasized the incredible problem inherent in interpreting experience: There are at least twenty-four possible aspects of any single statement, depending on where you're standing at the time or on what the weather's like. A categorical statement, I find, will never stay where it is and be finite. It will immediately be subject to modification by the other twenty-three possibilities of it? An enigma in itself, Pinter's theatre reflects the spiritual and philosophical enigmas of our age, and no criticism can presume to penetrate its ultimate mysteries. But it is not enough simply to say that Pinter presents disturbing images of man's problematic existence and leave it at that. "Between my lack of biographical data about [the characters] and the ambiguity of what they say," Pinter significantly warns, "lies a territory which is not only worthy of exploration but which it is compulsory to explore.,,3 In fact, close exploration reveals a remarkable coherence in Pinter's art. The continuing interplay between the characters and the objects and experiences that 167 168 MICHAEL W. KAUFMAN surround them which critics such as John Lahr, Martin Esslin, and James Hollis4 have rightly seen as the creative power of Pinter's theatre, serves to intensify what has always been Pinter's primary concern: to make manifest "an individual's otherwise inaccessible and inexpressible experience of living."s The Birthday Party, Pinter's first full-length play, is typical of his work and thus affords a clear insight into the dynamics of his theatre. Here external reality, created through casual conversations and ordinary encounters between characters, seems from the first nothing more than insipid dialogue and innocuous actions. But beneath the placid surfaces seethes the chaotic world of human emotions, and it is in this tension between society's ritualized conventions and men's violent impulses that the essential drama inheres. In The Birthday Party this seminal tension is epitomized in the games his characters play. In the various forms and contexts Pinter devises the game emerges as a subtle theatrical metaphor, a complex rite of language and action through which the characters can play out their fantasies, avoid their deepest fears, or find acceptable outlets for their hostile impulses. In this play particularly, the idea of the game with its corollary attitudes of playing and acting crystallize .in blind man's buff. Everything in the play points toward and moves away from this crucial complex of events. Now in Pinter's recurring figure of the blind man Stanley shatters the ritual framework of the game and with violent and passionate gestures of murder and rape he releases his repressed frustrations against Meg and Lulu, unwitting victims of his aroused frenzy. This bizarre and violent action has been variously interpreted. While the prevailing tendency is to understand Stanley's fury as his emphatic rejection of Meg's suffocating maternalism,6 or to see it as the inevitable consequence of society's repression of the individual,7 Pinter seems to be posing a more fundamental insight into human nature and its relations. For if The Birthday Party makes us uncomfortably aware of the brutality of societal coercion, it also demands that we recognize the need for civilized restraints to control our primitive natures. Simply put, the crisis in Pinter's plays arises when his characters realize that their own...