THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

Style: Setting The Birthday Party uses a single setting, the living-dining room of a seaside
boarding house somewhere on the coast of England. Its anonymity contributes to a sense of
place as symbol, especially in allegorical interpretations of the play.Although doors permit
characters to enter and exit the room, there are features suggesting that the room is isolated
from the world outside. The wall separating the room from the kitchen has a hatch allowing
characters in the kitchen to peer into the room, like jailors peering into a prison cell. There are
also windows that permit characters to see into the room but give no real glimpse of what lies
beyond them.References to the outside world beyond the room offer virtually no clues to time
or place. Petey reads a newspaper (which McCann later destroys), but the information he
relates from it is trivial. Names and places alluded to are either of little help or simply
mislea....
Meg Boles:Petey's wife, Meg Boles is a good-natured woman in her sixties. If only from a
lack of any reference to offspring of her own, it is implied that she and Petey are childless,
thus she fills a void in her life by turning the Boles's boarding-house tenant, Stanley Webber,
into a kind of surrogate child. She insists on calling him "boy" and mothering him. She even
takes liberties appropriate to a parentthough not to the landlady of an adult roomerby
invading his privacy to fetch him down to breakfast.
At the same time, Meg flirts with Stanley, trying to fill a second void in her life. Her
marriage to Petey has settled into mechanical routine, as their listless and inane dialogue
that opens the play reveals. Meg tries to win Stanley's approval of her as a woman,
shamelessly fishing for compliments. Stanley, in his mildly perverse manner.....
PLOT
The Birthday Party is composed of three acts, and is set in a seedy boarding house, run by
Meg and Petey, a couple in their sixties. There is only one boarder, Stanley, a scruffy,
depressed-looking man in his late thirties who has apparently been a professional pianist.
There are three figures who arrive in the boarding house from the outside world: Lulu, a
young woman who tries without success to get Stanley to go out with her; Goldberg, a
powerful and threatening Jewish man in his fifties; and McCann, an Irishman in his thirties,
taciturn and menacing. Goldberg and McCann have a distinct air of the bogus about them, as
if they were parodying their respective Jewishness and Irishness. It becomes clear that they
have come in pursuit of Stanley, to wreak vengeance upon him for a past misdemeanour, or to
reclaim him for a shadowy organisation that they represent. Following the arrival of Goldberg
and McCann, Meg decides to put on a party for Stanley, saying that it is his birthday, a claim
which Stanley denies. Meg gives Stanley a toy drum as a birthday present, which Stanley
beats with increasing savagery as the curtain comes down on Act I. Act II sees first a scene of
interrogation, as Goldberg and McCann ply Stanley with quickfire questions, eventually
reducing him to inarticulacy. The party atmosphere becomes increasingly hostile, however,
and Stanley is victimised in the course of a game of blind man\'s buff, before losing control,
and making as if first to strangle Meg, then to rape Lulu. Act III is set the morning after the
party. Goldberg and McCann, it becomes apparent, have been working on Stanley through the
night, and he is now dressed in a suit, clean-shaven, rendered conventional in appearance and
wholly inarticulate. Goldberg and McCann have achieved complete dominance over Stanley,
and are taking him off in their car to be dealt with by one Monty, evidently a professional,
perhaps a torturer or a psychiatrist, or both. Petey mounts a faint protest at the impending
removal of Stanley, but backs down in the face of a threat to himself. Meg outwardly remains
unaware that anything untoward has taken place as the play ends.