PINTER'S THE BIRTHDAY PARTY Part 4 of 4
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- Опубліковано 11 сер 2012
- But a birthday, I always feel, is a great occasion, taken too much for granted these days. What a thing to celebrate - birth! Like getting up in the morning. Marvelous! Some people don't like the idea of getting up in the morning. I've heard them. Getting up in the morning, they say, what is it? Your skin's crabby, you need a shave, your eyes are full of muck, your mouth is like a boghouse, the palms of your hands are full of sweat, your nose is clogged up, your feet stink, what are you but a corpse waiting to be washed? Whenever I hear that point of view I feel cheerful. Because I know what it is wake up with the sun shining, to the sound of the lawnmower, all the little birds, the smell of the grass, church bells, tomato juice -- From Harold Pinter's play, The Birthday Party.
The acting is brilliant. Pinter playing Goldberg is mesmerising. Great performance
If you say so. ♿
Can't say it was an "enjoyable" play exactly, but I certainly enjoyed it! Thanks for posting it and thanks to all the commenters.
What a brilliant play this is.
And its very very funny in a scary and totally morbid way.
That's what comedy of menace means ^_^
Brilliant metaphor: surreal Kafkaesque portrayal of humanity, each of us locked in our own private world, all of us quite mad, whether mired in tedium or manic in the pursuit of our goals or the flight from our fears, each of us must deal with the absurdity that confronts or compels us in our own peculiar way. It is our idiosyncrasies that ultimately define us. And though the characters are somewhat burlesque (as Pinter is apt to do), one can easily recognise behaviours consistent with those encountered in real life: rage, courtesy, falsity, discursiveness, deception, delusion, irrationality, repetition, obsession, paranoia. Of course there are deeper symbols at play here, too, such as religious oppression (Jewish orthodoxy and Irish Catholicism) and noncompliance with authority, but as to any overarching or definitive meaning, one is left to make one's own conclusions -- as Pinter would have it.
Great description. One of my favourite plays
You reckon eh?
lots of symbolism, but a lot of it i don't find surreal, find very normal, in the dysfunction that arises, in the difficulty we all have of living and relating without having expectations and judgements and mistakes cloud the most minimal of many daily activities and interactions ... fantastic play and production
You will need rehab after watching this.
:D
You'll need mustard on your Ham sandwich you mean?
Eerily fascinating or fascinatingly eerily, this play is something to behold! Harold Pinter, you are a genius.
"Another long exhausting day
Another thousand dollars
A matinée, a Pinter play
Perhaps a piece of Mahler's
I'll drink to that ...
And one for Mahler"
'The Ladies Who Lunch'
Stephen Sondheim - from 'Company'
It's like an episode of The Prisoner . . . that makes you realize your own life is like an episode of The Prisoner.
There is nothing 'bizarre' about this play at all. Pinter knows exactly what he is doing. It is frightening because it ruthlessly effectively plays out our everyday fears about identity/family/authority. Could you explain your last family Christmas? Could you explain everyone's thoughts and motivations? Play any games? Anything that anyone else might consider 'absurd'? The play is upsetting because it touches a nerve. It is a masterpiece.
@Eve Jeffrey. Pinter wrote "The Birthday Party" when he was 27 years old and it was received with much hostility by critics and audiences. Clearly his genius wasn't recognized until much later. I admire him for continuing to write in spite of the attacks on this play in particular. I believe that most writers would have quit under similar circumstances.
I agree with you Eve that there isn't anything bizarre about the play. The difficulty for first time viewers unfamiliar with his work, however, is the result of his efforts to actually reproduce reality in all of its broken, fragmented, stop and start experience. In conversation most of us fall into non-sequiturs and may occasionally spout nonsense. No doubt "The Birthday Party" was avant-garde for its time so it is understandable with the benefit of hindsight that audiences may have missed the humor. It is really a very funny play in many places. Goldberg's speech on birthdays still makes me smile.
Pinter's other plays, "The Caretaker" and "The Homecoming" are just as good and in some ways better with the latter play having an obvious influence on Sam Shepard's Pulitzer prize winning play "Buried Child". Fortunately, someone posted a film version of The Caretaker which appears elsewhere on UA-cam with the late great Robert Shaw and Donald Pleasance in the lead roles. It's a good view for sure.
@@britteach unfortunately still today audiences demand the simple way in which there is a straightforward plot which the actors narrate to each other. Today’s audience doesn’t want reality in its film theatre or tv. It wants escapism. You can dress your escapism up as reality - as TV soaps do - but it remains escapist, however brutal or explicit it is. The post-war movement towards changing drama - method, absurdism etc - could have participated in a change of direction for humanity. Sadly it didn’t, because the suits and the money took control and smothered the art with promotion and sex. I’ve lived through the whole cycle from
The brief moment of hope in the sixties right through to today with its desperate efforts to bring sanity back into mortal currency. I tried to be a part of it myself and was dismissed with such arrogance and ignorance I just gave up. But I did refuse to take these people’s money and make myself a career which is what they wanted. And I don’t regret it, not today, not ever.
ua-cam.com/video/2pi0zpg5E0U/v-deo.html
By the way possibly one of the best examples of the genre - for my money - is Polanski’s “Cul-De-Sac” : 100%! successful movie. If only Roman had stuck to his guns, stayed in Europe, and made some sacrifices in his own life.
@@britteach well said
it's a mirror to reality for many of us ... banal conversations, broken dreams, parents that infantilize their adult sons/daughter, complexes of ugly masculinity ... and so it goes
Absolutely stellar performance from Pinter here! It's always such a delight to see him pop up in cameos in his own work, but I'm quite blown away by his performance as Goldberg in this version. That charm and yet totally unhinged persona was something that came across quite strongly in the text and I always find it fascinating that writers can inhabit their own characters with such conviction. Pinter really was quite something. 🥲
Comedy of Menace.
Sir ur idea of movies on literature is excellent... It shows ur hard work, dedication & concern for students ... Salute 2 u sir
Thank you
Hilarious and menacing. Faulty Towers with wheels on.
Political tyranny as a metaphor of menace Pinter analyses Oppression in such regimes as dictatorships. The 2 main menacing characters are representative of the repressive social, political and religious systems. 2023 and the lemmings have no idea we are reliving this and 1984 …..literature has our history more than pomp and finery. What exactly are people aspiring to ?
I once played the part of McCann...in an amateur production of this piece at Cadburys, Bourneville in 1971. What fun we had! Whatever happened to my old pal John Patrick Smith, who directed the play?
Im playing McCann this year :)
Wow what a great monologue powerful actor
Thank you
thank you sooo much🙅
i was confused about this drama , but now iam cleared
thank youuu😇
that is very good ABSURD DRAMA
Expain This brother
Wow this was amazing. I really find that Pinter is trying to show an extreme version of the humans disconnecting from reality. The way the Meg and Petey engage in conversation is painfully banal and seems fo be a sort of refuge from meaningful, thought-provoking substance that could shatter this little haven they live in. Stanley however is disorientated from the dissapointments in his past and resolving to speak about it results in a strained fragmentery recollections that indicate his doubt in it. Besides, the metaphorical language he uses to substitute the truth such as "playing the piano" and having a "concert" serves to amplify his disilusionment with reality as is his prolonged stay at this house that becomes a place where the inhabitants are shutting themselves off from real life.
I also like that Meg is the only one who is certain of anything. "this is a very good boarding house; I know it is."
I agree with what you say, except it's not so extreme - these are typical things imo when lives go off the tracks, come up a bit short/people fail to realize their expectations.
I don't what play go on. I not understand any one Tell What is this??
Thank u
Bloody shame what happened to Stan...and the BBC.
Very funny,but ultimately doesn’t it show the meaningless of life, or the absurdity of it. All the characters are totally mad, but normal at the same time, the stretching of normality before it loses touch with humanity.
I had to Watch it just bcz of my exams!! English literature student fact
that's right
Very interesting...never seen the birthday party before, which is strange because I have known about Pinter since school, read the caretaker and saw the homecoming on TV. I thought the homecoming was so brilliant I suppose that did for me. I'm not sure about the whole 'blow in my mouth' bit and Goldberg's showing weakness. I suppose it shows that even the 'interrogators' have their own disintegrating delusions of self but the whole 'blowing' bit just seemed absurd for the sake of being absurd.
Given that McCann turns out to be an unfrocked priest, could the breathing bit be a wickedly funny play on the hymn line, 'Breathe on me, breath of God'? Perhaps it could also allude to the Sacrament, not to mention sexual practice.
this was my first experience of Pinter. it reminded me for George Orwell's 1984 ...and what happens to the main character in the end reminds me of Stanley. but who is Monty?
Thats because they're vampires
Monty was a political war hero and Pinter was a pacifist and was nearly locked up for refusing to fight. This is so much identity politics as social, religious and political strictures …
not sure either, could have a lot of explanations ... 'hot air', exchanging idle words, idle vapors, or just a ploy of hierarchy submission, or just a bit of a red herring talking point ... another rather empty exchange between humans, etc.
Stanley flew over the cuckoo’s nest
This sent me to sleep
Sweet dreams
@@kennydurkin Thank you
Like all my family xmases
Who is Monty?
im pretty sure that Harold Pinter didnt play goldberg just to have Lulu on his lap; definitely not the case.
I don't think Pinter had any need for tactics like that 🙂
@@steeleye2112 absolutely with you, hundred percent! he certainly didn't do it to spank meg as well.
1:51
Can anyone explain what on earth that was all about?
The play is about a lot of things too numerous to write about adequately here. It is probably easier to talk about specific characters or moments or ideas in the play than it is to make sweeping generalizations about it as a whole, but here I go anyway.
On one level Pinter appears to be exploring the nature of power -- what it is, how it is used, and perhaps most insightfully, just how devastating is the power of suggestion. This is not a play that one sits and watches passively. Part of its pleasure is in trying to derive meaning from the words and actions just as one would go about doing in actual life. The pauses, the ellipses...., the fragmentary recollections, all come as close as possible to mimicking the way human beings actually experience events and process information. Pinter will set you up, create the conditions, give you a premise, and then let you go to work filling in the gaps. Just as we do in our actual lives.
Structurally, Pinter makes good use of pairs and paring because that is the simplest way to introduce and sustain conflict. And it's not just conflict between characters’' desires, but also the conflict between reality and perception, memory and imagination, which we notice from their speeches.
Pinter is also very funny. In spite of the troubling behavior of Goldberg and McCann, he manages to make me laugh throughout the play. The clash between his menacing presence in the boardinghouse at the beginning of the play and his sweetly idealized recollections of his youth after he has settled in is wickedly funny.
If you are interested, you might find reading one or two critical or interpretative essays about the play to be useful. His biographer Michael Billington gives a valuable account of the initial critical reception to “The Birthday Party” when it was first produced in 1957. Not surprisingly, critics were hostile, so much so that it had me wondering where Pinter found the strength and the courage to pursue a career in theater after being trashed so badly.
But “The Birthday Party” is worth the time to study and to enjoy on many different levels and in time people who enjoy theater as an artform came to value his plays. They still do.
britteach Thank you for this detailed reply! I am currently looking at the text for class, but find watching it easier (plays aren't meant to be read!). But even after watching this I was completely baffled as to what was actually going on and what I was supposed to take away from this play. I like what you have said about the power of words and suggestion. I will definitely have to look more into it as it is still hard to get my head around. I kept expecting it to go somewhere, and tie up the loose ends and it never did. I'm not so good at abstract thinking so this may take time.
Thanks
The key line is 'Don't let them tell you what to do!' The play is 'about' the strictures of religion and 'tradition', and their attempts to negate a man's freedom, make him part of 'society'. Look at the surnames of the two antagonists - Goldberg and McCann - and think of what they represent. And then look at how Stanley ends up, dressed up in tie and suit, ready for his assimilation into modern 'society'...
With all the references to Ireland, whiskey and names i.e McCann etc it crossed my mind that the IRA had come to reclaim him. Yet, as you say, Pinter left it to the audience to 'fill in the gaps'.
Clearly, art is not meant for everybody. Go back to sleep.
8:29
Is Stanley a crime under arrested?
Very bizarre
programing for the unreal TELL LIE VISION programing .
A Scouser? What was in Harold's briefcase?
Creepy
I don't how people enjoy this one. 😢
Bizzarre tripe
Did I miss something??
ABSOLUTE RUBBISH
Goldberg is not "Jewish" enough in this-----much better in the movie version
That's an interesting opinion, as Goldberg was played by Harold Pinter, who wrote the play, and was Jewish himself.
Harold Pinter is Jewish...but what did he know?
Shite.