“REVISITING THE COMEDY OF MENACE”

By Raymond Benson

Harold Pinter was one of the groundbreaking playwrights that emerged out of the 1950s, along with Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and a handful of others. They changed the landscape of what audiences could expect on the stage. Pinter’s first decade of remarkable plays (and a few screenplays) fall into a category dubbed by critics as “comedies of menace.” They feature (usually) working-class Britons in situations in which an ambiguous threat lies underneath the surface of an otherwise mundane existence. The subtext is everything in a Pinter play. Known for the pauses in dialogue (specifically designated in the scripts), Pinter was able to pack weighty meaning in what is not said, more so than perhaps any other modern playwright.

The Birthday Party was his first full-length play (written in 1957, premiered in 1958) and is one of his most-produced and well-known works—although probably not so much by anyone who isn’t an aficionado of the theatre. You’re not going to see a production of The Birthday Party at your local high school. The Homecoming (1967) won Pinter the Tony Award, and, for my money, is his greatest work (it was brilliantly filmed by Peter Hall in 1973 for the American Film Theatre experiment). As a screenwriter, Pinter’s work on The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) and Betrayal (1983) received Oscar nominations, and he received the Nobel Prize shortly before his death.

Young filmmaker William Friedkin, who had yet to make The French Connection and The Exorcist, had seen a production of The Birthday Party in England in the early 60s and, by his account, was knocked out by it. He personally met with Pinter to convince the elusive playwright to allow him to adapt the play into a film. It took some doing, but finally Pinter relented and wrote the screenplay himself. The picture was produced on a shoestring budget, but Friedkin managed to employ several outstanding British actors—many of whom were already a part of Pinter’s unofficial “repertory company.”

For those familiar with Pinter, the results are outstanding. For everyone else—The Birthday Party could very well be a bewildering experience.

Robert Shaw stars as Stanley, a nervous boarder in a seaside village rooming house run by Meg (Dandy Nichols) and Petey (Moultrie Kelsall). It may—or may not be!—Stanley’s birthday. Enter two mysterious new boarders, Goldberg (Sydney Tafler) and McCann (Patrick Magee), whom we know have an agenda with Stanley but we’re never sure what it really is. We just know it’s a threat, and they make things very uncomfortable for him… and the audience. Shaw and Magee, especially, deliver riveting performances.

To say more would be a disservice to the viewer and to Pinter, for much of the power of The Birthday Party is its mystery and ambiguity. Just know that by embarking on this journey you will be entering a heightened realism in which characters never say what they mean and what they don’t say means more. As an adaptation of Pinter’s play, Friedkin’s The Birthday Party is quite faithful and potent.

Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray presents a 1080p transfer that looks fair enough for its age and intentionally drab cinematography and setting. The nearly half-hour supplemental interview with director Friedkin is fascinating—he relates the entire history of how he got involved with Pinter and the film, and he throws in anecdotes about the playwright and a few other characters (like Joseph Losey). Theatrical trailers for this and other Kino Lorber releases—many related to Pinter—are also included.

The Birthday Party will certainly be appreciated by those of us who were theatre majors many years ago, and by the art house cinema crowd. For others, the picture might be an acquired taste.

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