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The term “comedy of menace” was first used by David Campton as a subtitle to his four short plays The Lunatic view”. Now it signifies a kind of play in which a character or more characters feel the menacing presence—actual or imaginary, of some obscure and frightening force, power or personality. The dramatist exploits this kind of menace as a source of comedy. Harold Pinter exploited the possibilities of this kind of situation in his early plays like "The Room", "Birthday Party" and "A Slight Ache", where the both the character/s and the audience face an atmosphere, apparently funny but actually having suggestiveness of some impending threat from outside. Pinter himself explained the situation thus: "more often than not the speech only seems to be funny - the man in question is actually fighting a battle for his life". He also said: Everything is funny until the horror of the human situation rises to the surface! Life is funny because it is based on illusions and self-deceptions, like Stanley’s dream of a world tour as a pianist, because it is built out of pretence.” In fact the play Birthday Party is built around the exchanges of words, which, though funny enough, contain hints that suggest the impending doom lurking around to them. Meg’s situation as a childless old woman who talks through repetitions may seem funny and odd, but those cover up her unconscious desire to have son, a desire she tries to fulfil through the mothering of Stanley and Petey. But Above all, Stanley’s staying in a sea-side lodge, his shabby appearance combined with inconsistent words and memorising may seem strange and invoke mild laughter but in reality he is facing a crisis which he is himself not completely aware of.
Pinter creates an atmosphere of menace through a variety of dramatic elements and techniques. First of all, he lets situations fall from a light-hearted situation unexpectedly down to one which is highly serious. For instance, while talking to Meg among other things, he tells her about a wheel-barrow which will come to the house for some body. Here we get a suggestion of impending death through the sudden reference to coffin. Again, we see Meg offering Staley the gift of a drum as a compliment to his supposed musical talent. But Stanley begins to beat it with such savagery that the audience is left dumb-struck as to the real intention behind this. This kind of abrupt explosion of violence is once again seen when Stanley kicks at McCann. But more importantly, menace is presented through the fears the characters feel but cannot spot. First of all, fear of weather is introduced: the characters repeatedly enquire about weather, and this becomes tangible once the audience understand that the lodge is situated on the coast of a sea. Then Stanley tries to frighten Meg by prophesying the arrival of wheel-barrow which, of course, does not come for her. On the other hand, on hearing the visit of two strangers, Stanley feels a complex fear—first of all, the fear of being driven away from the lodge which has become for him as comfortable as his mother’s womb. A house represents security and comforts from the hazards of the outside world but sadly it is impossible to sustain. Goldberg and McCann is the embodiment of menace from a hostile outside world. We also note that he stays in a lodge, which cannot be a substitute for home. Secondly, Stanley faces the fear of being persecuted by the intruders. That is why he expresses his desire to run away with Lulu, but is afraid of doing so in reality.
With the hosting of the birthday party, the play reaches its climax of menace. A birthday party is expected to be a ritualistic celebration of one’s life, but in the case of Stanley it turns out to be the greatest ordeal of life leading to his complete mental derangement. The audience now understand the menace turning real though in transformed forms. Stanley faces not only physical assault but also a torrent of words, with the serious accusations like "He’s killed his wife" mingled with trivial and ludicrous like "Why do you pick your nose?". The persons who could have saved him are either absent or drunk.
The play ends with Stanley’s forced removal from the house by Goldberg and McCann who leave a further note of unknown menace awaiting Stanley in near future. This uncertain menace is further strengthened by Petey’s inability to communicate to Meg what has exactly happened with Stanley. To conclude, it can be said that the final impression of the play on the audience echoes Pinter’s own words: " In our present-day world, everything is uncertain, there is no fixed point, we are surrounded by the unknown ... There is a kind of horror about and I think that this horror and absurdity (comedy) go together."
Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, was the playwright's first commercially-produced, full-length play. He began writing the work after acting in a theatrical tour, during which, in Eastbourne, England, he had lived in ‘‘filthy insane digs.’’ There he became acquainted with "a great bulging scrag of a woman'' and a man who stayed in the seedy place. The flophouse became the model for the rundown boarding house of the play and the woman and her tenant the models, respectively, for the characters of Meg Boles and Stanley Webber.
In an earlier work, The Room, a one-act play, Pinter had worked on themes and motifs that he would carry over into The Birthday Party and some of his succeeding plays. Among these themes are the failure of language to serve as an adequate tool of communication, the use of place as a sanctum that is violated by menacing intruders, and the surrealistic confusions that obscure or distort fact.
Directed by Pinter himself, the finished full-length play premiered in Cambridge, England, at the Arts Theatre, on April 28, 1958. There and on tour in Oxford it was quite successful, but when, under the direction of Peter Wood, it moved to London and later opened on May 19 at the Lyric Opera House in Hammersmith, it met with harsh reviews and closed down within a week. Among the reviewers, only Harold Hobson of the Sunday Times saw much promise in the play. He thought that Pinter had considerable originality and was ‘‘the most disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London.’’ However, his review appeared too late to do the production any good. The show was already off the boards, done in by abysmal attendance, including one matinee audience of six, and persistently hostile reviews. Most critics opined that Pinter floundered in obscurity and suffered from the negative influence of Samuel Beckett(Waiting for Godot), Eugene Ionesco (The Bald Prima Donna), and other avant-garde writers.
Pinter would later marvel at the fact that in London the play was "completely massacred by the critics'' but noted that it was the only maltreatment he had received from reviewers and that it never dimmed his interest in writing. The work, in fact, became the dramatist's first full-length ‘‘comedy of menace,’’ a group of plays that secured Pinter's reputation as a premier, avant-garde playwright. Subsequent productions were much better received, including the play's 1964 revival at London's Aldwych Theatre and its 1968 Broadway premier at the Booth Theatre in New York. By the mid-1960s, the burgeoning appreciation of absurdist drama and the success of other plays by Pinter, including The Dumbwaiter (1959) and The Caretaker(1960), had secured for The Birthday Party a reputation as a classic in the dramatic genre that literary critic Martin Esslin dubbed the Theatre of the Absurd.
The Birthday Partyopens in the living-dining area of a seedy rooming house at an unnamed seaside resort in England. Petey and Meg Boles, the proprietors, converse while she prepares his breakfast and he reads the newspaper. Their talk is inane, centering on their tenant, Stanley Webber. Petey also tells her of two strangers who might come to rent a room.
Meg decides to wake Stanley for breakfast and goes to his room. Unshaven and half-dressed, Stanley comes downstairs and sits at the table to eat. After Petey goes off to work, Stanley teases Meg about her "succulent" fried bread, but when she becomes affectionate, he gets irritated and complains that her tea is "muck" and the place is a "pigsty."
Meg tells Stanley about the two men who may be new tenants. At first he is worried but then shrugs the information off as a ‘‘false alarm.’’..