Book: The Birthday party/ Author: Harold Pinter/ Genre: Drama, Comedy of Menace./ Publisher: Faber and Faber (March 4, 1991) / ISBN-10: 0571160786 / Price: $16.34

2005 Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter's play The Birthday Party, like Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, continues to puzzle and unsettle its readers and audience since its hostile reception in 1958. Pinter takes Beckett's theatrical world further, developing a new comedic style to reflect the chaos and insecurity of the world stuck by the two world wars.

Pinter is credited with the invention of a new dramatic style known as 'Comedy of menace' which is an offshoot of the seminal 'Theater of Absurd'. Comedy of Menace is a kind of psychological drama in which supposedly secure space is contested by characters who are the embodiments of each other fears, insecurities or latent sexuality. It is a kind of comedy in which laughter in some or all situations is accompanied by some impending disaster. The comedy frightens and unsettles. The Absurd in Pinter's plays comes from menace. Some of the many features of Comedy of menace can be summed up as, plausibility of hidden danger, apparent normality, a sense of impending disaster, use of irony where communication is useless, surrealistic confusion that obscure or distort facts, use of place that is violated by outsiders. Menace and fear are not external elements as Pinter opines "they do not come from extraordinary, sinister people, but from you and me, it is all a matter of circumstances"

Apparently, The Birthday party is a conventional play set in a boarding house run by Meg and Petey where Stanley Webber, a musician , is the sole occupant. Stanley, a shabby looking man in his late 30's is hinted to have a sexual relation with her landlady Meg. The boarding house, as Meg in her fancy wants to call it being "on the list" is claustrophobic, dirty and suffocating. Stanley shows relent when he is informed by Petey about the arrival of some guests who will stay with them. But before Stanley can do anything the guests are there. The Intruders Goldberg and McCann arrive, as it becomes clear later, in pursuit of Stanley. But the reason is not made clear. Meg insists it's Stanley's Birthday, a claim that Stanley denies, and she plans to throw a party which is followed by a game of blind man's buff that reveals situations, characteristics and personalities that language fails to communicate. The play ends as Stanley is taken away by Goldberg and McCann to be dealt by some man called Monty. In spite of a traditional three act division, a simple plot, the play opens up to absurdity when the reader seeks reason behind the actions and is not provided for. This is exactly where the play becomes both menacing and disturbing leaving readers and audience delving into the possibilities of interpretations that may transpire.

Pinter had once said "I think we communicate only too well in our silence, in what is unsaid..". For Pinter language that people use in life is an attempt to cover up or evade the truth. The Birthday Party is a dramatization of this horror, of never being able to come clean from the smoke screen of words, the horror of continual evasion, of desperate attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves, the horror when 'communication becomes too alarming'. Language in Pinter's plays is a deception. It leads to nihilism, chaos, futility, vacuum. Words are there because they should be there not because they are meant to be there. The dialogue between Meg and Petey shows the inability to carry on any fruitful communication.

Meg: Is that you Petey?

Pause.

Petey is that you?

Pause.

Petey?

Petey: What?

Meg: Is that you?

Petey: Yes, It's me.

Meg: What? Are you back?

Petey: Yes.

It reminds one of the sterile relationships between the characters in T.S.Eliot's seminal poem The Wasteland. The couple attempts to find solace in each other and find 'Nothing'.

'What is that noise?'

The wind under the door.

'What is that noise now?What is the wind doing?'

Nothing again nothing.

'Do

you know nothing? Do You see nothing?Do you

remember

Nothing?'.....

'What shall I do now? What shall i do?.....

What shall we ever do?'

The nothingness of human situation as depicted by many modern writers continues to fascinate generations in search of any definite meaning of life. Like Beckett's Waiting For Godot, Eliot's The Wasteland, Kafka's short stories, Badal Sircar's Evam Indrajeet, Pinter's The Birthday Party eludes any definite interpretation. Some critics like to read it as a social allegory where the artist Stanley is obliged to adapt to the materialistic society which had tried to reject. While some others critics, encouraged by Pinter's acknowledged debt to Beckett, see the play as a dramatization of man's decay into death, a metaphorical and metaphysical death. This interpretation comes very close to acceptance in the light of the dialogues in the play. Goldberg says to Stanley: "you are dead. you can't live, you can't think, you can't love. you're dead."

The finest pleasure in reading Pinter is to explore the plethora of interpretations and enjoy the way his works open themselves to it.