being told
by Douglas Messerli
Harold
Pinter (screenplay), William Friedkin (director) The Birthday Party / 1968
It’s
interesting that Harold Pinter’s play, The
Birthday Party, was written at
about the same time that Günter Grass’ novel Die Blechtrommel (The Tin
Drum) was being composed,* for the Pinter play features a character—a kind
of surly man-boy figure, Stanley. who is treated almost as a child by his quite
dotty landlady, Meg—who, like Grass’ man-child, Oskar Matzerath, is given a tin
drum (an absurd birthday gift from Meg, who claims, with her usual illogic, to
have chosen it because the former piano player didn’t have a piano). And
somewhat like Grass’s fiction about the infantization of an entire populace,
Pinter’s play, as I read it, suggests that if you accost any down-in-the-heels
Britain with the issues having to do with the Irish and the Jews he will
quickly turn into a driveling idiot unable to communicate in any way other than
a new-born’s babel.
Ten years after its London premiere—a
production which apparently so confused and scandalized the British public that
it closed after only 8 performances—American filmmaker William Friedkin
determined to film the work.
The result is a fascinating in work that, with
regard to its actors’ ability to convey Pinter’s stunning turns of language and
logic, proceeds quite excellently. Dandy Nichols and Roger Shaw are
particularly brilliant as Meg and Stanley, and, as the two would-be villains
close in upon their prey, Patrick McGee as McCann and Sydney Tafler as Goldberg
show off their thespian talents as well.
While some critics have complained that
the work is not cinematic enough, I would argue that Friedkin has done a
credible job portraying the sense of increasing claustrophobia with his camera
jumpily cutting across the surfaces of the filthily cramped rooms, particularly
the kitchen and living room where most the action takes place. Although there
are some references, as in Joseph Losey’s The
Servant, to the fun-house possibilities of mirrored images, for the most
part Friedkin relies more on the fitful creak of his seemingly hand-held
camera.
If the denizens of this nightmare
flophouse cannot cope with the realities of their world, it is because they
have no language in which to express it. While Petey shouts out to the
devastated Stanley as they take him away, “Don’t let them tell you what to do,”
we know that that is precisely the problem with Stanley, Meg, and Petey
himself; their cliché-ridden language utterly determines how they behave and
what they do. Their identities are limited by their delusions of themselves,
the play ending with the truly blinded Meg (she does not even know that her
beloved man-child has been taken from her life) suggesting to Petey that during
the drunken melee of her last evening “I was the belle of the ball…I know I was.”
Los Angeles, April 16, 2015
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (April
2015).
*The Birthday Party premiered in 1957, while Grass’s novel was published in 1959 and translated into English in 1961.
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