Show:                 The Birthday Party

Type:                  Play

Venue:                The Harold Pinter Theatre

Date:                  Tuesday 28^th March 2018 (Matinee)

Seen with:         Tout seule

Ticket:                £22

View:                  ‘Restricted view’ but not too bad – able to ignore the small column a few rows                   ahead and almost ignore the head of the tall man in front

Cast:                   Toby Jones, Zoe Wanamaker, Peter Wight, Stephen Mangan, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Pearl Mackie

Verdict:         In my very, very (veryveryvery) humble opinion, The Birthday Party is Theatre of the Absurd made accessible to a wider audience. Although audiences and critics didn’t seem to agree when it was first staged in London in 1958 – I’m pretty sure it closed after less than a week. I’ve also seen it described as Comedy of Menace, but I’m going to stick to absurd, for the simple fact that it is. It’s absurd. And yet it is accessible. It follows a familiar 3-act structure, the action takes place in a recognisable setting (a boarding house at the sea side), the characters appear functional and properly formed at first glance, and you feel for almost the entire first act that the play is going somewhere, that it’s going to resolve in the expected manner.
Putting on the Speech Pathologist hat for a moment, it almost reminds me of patients with fluent aphasia – they use a lot of words, but since they don’t use content words they don’t really say anything. The Birthday Party almost appears to be a functional and comprehensible story on the surface, but when you look closer you realise that everything in it – characters, plot, dialogue – is untethered and incomprehensible.
The show itself was fantastically acted, particularly Stephen Mangan, who was eerily charismatic and creepy at the same time, and Zoe Wanamaker, who was the addlepated Meg right down to every twitch of her fingertips. The staging was also just great – the lighting that so fluidly showed the passage of time through the day, the windows and doors and half-glimpsed rooms that allowed the ambient noise to filter through to the audience. Very much enjoyed!

Notes:                 Fun fact – The Birthday Party was originally staged at the Lyric Hammersmith, which is just up the road from me and *technically* my local theatre. Isn’t it a lovely sounding thing, to have a local theatre?