'The Birthday Party' as pinteresque play.pptx

Presentation Sem-2

1. ‘The Birthday Party ‘ as ‘ Pinteresque play ’

2. Introduction Name :- Aarti Bhupatbhai Sarvaiya Roll No :- 01 Enrollment No :- 4069206420220027 Sem :- 2(M.A.) Batch :- 2022-2024 Paper No. :- 110 Paper Code :- 22403 Paper Name :- History of English Literature – From 1900 to 2000 Submitted to :- Smt. S. B. Gardi, Department of English,M.K.B.U. Dated on :- 15 March 2023 Email :- [email protected]

3. Point s to Ponder :- About the Playwright About the Play ‘The Birthday Party ‘ as pinteresque play Conclusion References

4. About the Playwright Harold Pinter was British playwright. Born into a working-class family, he acted with touring companies until 1959. T he full-length The Birthday Party (1958). His next major plays, The Caretaker (1960) and The Homecoming (1965), established his reputation as an innovative and complex dramatist, sometimes considered as belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd. He often used disjointed small talk and lengthy pauses in dialogue to convey a character’s thought, which often contradicts his speech. Pinter’s later plays include Old Times (1971), No Man’s Land (1975), Betrayal (1978; film, 1983), Mountain Language (1988), Moonlight (1993), and Celebration (2000). He also wrote radio and television plays, as well as screenplays for The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), The Handmaid’s Tale (1990), and Sleuth (2007). In 2005 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

5. About the Play The Birthday Party, drama in three acts by Harold Pinter, produced in 1958 and published in 1959. Pinter’s first full-length play established his trademark “comedy of menace,” in which a character is suddenly threatened by the vague horrors at large in the outside world. The action takes place entirely in a shabby rooming house where Stanley, a lazy young boarder, is shaken out of his false sense of security by the arrival of two mysterious men who proceed to “punish” him for crimes that remain unrevealed. A birthday party staged by Stanley’s landlady soon turns into an exhibition of violence and terror. Harold Pinter (1930-2008) is mostly acclaimed as a wonderful playwright of the twentieth century despite his other roles of a poet, an actor and so on. He was influenced by the modernist playwright Samuel Beckett and his plays. But as a tribute to his unique style of writing Pinter was accredited with the adjective ‘Pinteresque’, which makes him different from other writers of the period. His 1958 play The Birthday Party serves a best example for the justification of the Pinteresque as remarkably distinctive. The play employs a very few characters and portrays the life in the post-war world. (Fathima)

6. ‘The Birthday Party ‘ as pinteresque play Harold Pinter is widely regarded as one of the most influential representatives of British theatre in the twentieth century. The significance of his tremendous contribution to modern theatre has been summed up in one theatrical terminology, namely, “Pinteresque”. Though Pinter’s plays are characteristic of minimal plots and limited characters, the dialogues are filled with powerful tension. (Pinter) The word ‘play’ literally means to have fun and thus postmodernism hints at a kind of celebration of something. In order to mark this transition, the Pinteresque in The Birthday Party offers a clear cut distinction between the two periods and hence takes in both the elements of modernist and postmodernist movements in the history of English literature and the post war world in general. This makes Pinter an absurdist in style while drifting away from the complete sense of an absurd writer. The very fact puts his play in the list of the comedy of menace which intermingle the elements of tragedy and comedy.

7. Continue….. The word ‘Pinteresque’ defines the period of high modernism after the 1950’s when the play was written. It was a time when disorder was the order of the day. The fundamental belief that man is a social animal proved to be a failure. Because the disorder was due to the fragmentation of particularly the social institutions and thereby confusion pervaded in the society. (Fatima) Harold Pinter is trying to portray a similar twentieth- century culture when he deviates from the usual custom of giving enough background information about the characters. They are known by their age, that is simply some meaningless number, and not by their profession or their relationship with each other.This lack in background information may mean that the characters are different independent individuals with little connection between them and who are yet to create a meaning for their own life. Pinter can be seen in his way of presenting the most antithetical aspects of his time through Stanley and Goldberg. Those antithetical aspects are nothing but the conflicts within a person about either maintaining a questioning attitude towards the society or being complacent about it.

8. Continue….. Petey, Goldberg and Mccann use their powerful rhetoric to silence others, especially Stanley, and become representatives of the capitalist ideology. But the unique charm of Pinter as a writer lies in the fact that he never makes these characters especially Goldberg villainous in nature.

9. Conclusion Harold Pinter’s plays usually start with laughter; he uses funny elements, and eventually, the setting turns into psychological and physical violence. His plays are more surprising for the audience, and during these stages, the play examines identity, through existentialism in the form of the Absurd Theatre. The play shows how a man in the entertainment of others has been ignored and wholly abandoned. The play depicts the mental and neural depression of postwar individuals and reflects how people are abstracted from society. Obscurity is the most prominent component in The Birthday Party that takes place through conversations and interactions that give us some significant clues to understand the ambiguity of the world where we live in. Harold Pinter creates an ambiguous story to recount thecurrent situation of the world. (Saman)

10. Works Cited Britannica, The Information Architects of Encyclopaedia. "Harold Pinter". Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 Mar. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/facts/Harold-Pinter. Accessed 12 March 2023. Hashemipour, Saman. The Pinteresque Absurdum in the Birthday Party. SSRN, 15 Apr. 2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3558397 . Pinter, Harold. “Power From Pinteresque Discourse in The Birthday Party.” CORE, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/236303963.pdf. Accessed 15 March 2023. S, Fathima Jinan. “Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal.” Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal, 31 12 2017, https://www.the-criterion.com/V8/n6/BT01.pdf. Accessed 15 March 2023.

11. Thank You