Comedy of Menace in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party Instructor: Basaad Maher Mhayyal

Abstract

Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1957) clearly portrays the condition of modern man where there is a real communication failure among the characters. Through this play, Pinter tries his best to reflect this fact. He uses a lot of pauses and silences, i.e., the usage of language is no more significant to modern man. Pinter considers silence to be more powerful than the words themselves. That’s why long and short pauses can be seen throughout all Pinter’s plays. Modern man has been living in a state of alienation. All the characters are isolated by their own desire not to communicate with each other and to lock themselves away from the world. They are unable to express their feelings. Therefore modern man has buried himself in life just like the character of )Stanley( in this play who has buried himself in the boarding house in an attempt to be away from his own society after being rejected as a pianist by the people of that society. The play deals with human deterioration and the process of death. The disaster in the play does not lie in the idea of death, but in the more terrible state of being dead in life, as in )Stanley(’s case, who hides himself in a room ceasing all his relationships with life outside. This paper deals with Harold Pinter as a well-known British playwright who has his own unique style that is called Pinteresque, his language, and how he uses silences and pauses in his play The Birthday Party. It consists of an abstract, Pinter’s comedy of menace, his play The Birthday Party, and a conclusion