When The Birthday Party had its first London staging in 1957, it was so savaged by the daily press, it closed after a week. Since then, the play has rightly been recognized as a masterpiece, but one would not realize this on the basis of the carelessly directed and pallidly acted revival now on the boards. In this mounting, the three acts are played without intermission -- which has the virtue of letting us go home as soon as possible.
The location is a seaside boardinghouse run by fussbudget Meg and her laconic husband Petey. Stanley Webber, a once-upon-a-time pianist, is their sole boarder, who seems never to stray from home and is appallingly unkempt. He is the prey of two strange visitors: the Jewish Goldberg and the Catholic McCann. In the second act, the pair interrogate Stanley and then participate in a riotous birthday party, joined by a young neighbor, Lulu. The last act finds Stanley spruced up and catatonic, able only to gurgle "caahh...caahh," the child's word for shit, before being carted off in Goldberg's car.
The play opens comically; but the fun gradually diminishes as the evening proceeds. Much of the menace and mystery is missing here. The chief mystery is why the director failed to observe many of the carefully scripted details. As Meg, Prunella Scales seems ill-at-ease. Her real-life husband, Timothy West, conveys not the slightest hint of Jewishness in his Goldberg (a role played by Pinter himself a dozen years ago).
Barry Jackson's Petey, Nigel Terry's McCann, and Lisa Dulson's Lulu are passable. Steven Pacey strikes me as far too old for Stanley (playwright Sir Alan Ayckbourn acted the role at 19, under Pinter's own direction); one misses the cruel corrupting of youth. Stanley's final appearance ought to bring a shock of horror -- not so here.
