The Birthday Party (play)

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The Birthday Party (1957) is the first full-length play by Harold Pinter, first published in London by Encore Publishing in 1959.^[1] It is one of his best-known and most frequently performed plays.^[2]

In the setting of a rundown seaside boarding house, a little birthday party is turned into a nightmare when two sinister strangers arrive unexpectedly. The play has been classified as a comedy of menace, characterised by Pinteresque elements such as ambiguous identity, confusions of time and place, and dark political symbolism.

Pinter began writing The Birthday Party in the summer of 1957 while touring in Doctor in the House. He later said: "I remember writing the big interrogation scene in a dressing room in Leicester."^[3]