The birthday party summary harold pinter biography
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Act I
The play begins in the living room of a seaside boardinghouse in 1950s England. Petey, the boardinghouse owner, and his wife Meg, both in their sixties, sit at the living room table and engage in tepid conversation while eating breakfast. Meg is an inquisitive character who peppers Petey with repeated questions concerning his food, his job, etc. Petey informs his wife that two gentlemen will soon arrive to stay at the boardinghouse; he met them the night before. Meg is flustered by the news at first, but quickly recovers to promise she will have a room ready for them.
She then calls out to Stanley Webber, their boarder who is asleep upstairs. When he doesn’t answer, she goes upstairs to fetch him, and then returns a bit disheveled but amused. Stanley, a bespectacled, unkempt, surly man in his thirties, soon follows. Petey and Stanley speak of mundane topics while Meg prepares cornflakes
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The Birthday Party: Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter was a British dramatist, poet, screenwriter, actor and director; winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Olivier Award.
Pinter was born on October 10th 1930 in London. From a young age, he developed an interest in poetry. From 1951 until the early 1960s, he worked as a repertory actor and started writing plays. In the 1960s he became a key figure in the Theatre of the Absurd.
Throughout his career, Pinter produced works for stage, film and radio. He wrote poetry and acted until the last years of his life. Pinter was also politically active in many antiwar campaigns. He died on December 24th 2008 in London.
The Birthday Party: play
Cake, balloons, confetti, music. These are the usual elements that make up a fun birthday party. Well, that's not what Stanley Webber's birthday party looks like. The main character in Harold Pinter's playThe Birthday Party (1958)is forced to celebrate his birthday by two mysterious m
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The Birthday Party
HAROLD PINTER 1958
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
PLOT SUMMARY
CHARACTERS
THEMES
STYLE
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
CRITICAL OVERVIEW
CRITICISM
SOURCES
FURTHER READING
Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, was the playwright’s first commercially-produced, full-length play. He began writing the work after acting in a theatrical tour, during which, in Eastbourne, England, he had lived in “filthy insane digs.” There he became acquainted with “a great bulging scrag of a woman” and a man who stayed in the seedy place. The flophouse became the model for the rundown boarding house of the play and the woman and her tenant the models, respectively, for the characters of Meg Boles and Stanley Webber.
In an earlier work, The Room, a one-act play, Pinter had worked on themes and motifs that he would carry over into The Birthday Party and some of his succeeding plays. Among these themes are the failure of language to serve as an adequate tool of communication, the use of place as a