Menace missing in Nazi party

In the haunting excursion into Kafka country Harold Pinter made in his extraordinary, first full-length play, he steered a fine line between black comedy and unfathomable horror.

Lindsay Posner's wrong-headed direction of The Birthday Party tilts far too much towards the comic. Eileen Atkins scales deliciously amusing heights as a half-demented, Baby Jane landlady, Meg, whose insistently flirtatious hands will go roving fleshwards in the direction of Paul Ritter's Stanley, an unlovely, unshaven shambles of a man.

Perhaps because of this comic slanting the play's inexorable sense of menace, coercion and destruction are sacrificed to the production's low-key antidynamics.

Critics are eternally divided over The Birthday Party. They have described it absurdly in Freudian terms as a man's escape from infantile and Oepidal sexuality, unconvincingly as a politicoreligious play in which Stanley passively resists the forces of Catholic and Jewish authority. These lofty elucidations do not convince me. The narrative line of the Birthday Party surely functions as a simple, terrifying allegory.

Fortyish Stanley, washed up and given up in a decrepit seaside boarding house where he is sole resident, no longer works as a concert-party pianist or anything at all. Two men arrive in a flashy car. Henry Goodman's winsomely comic rather than threatening Goldberg, and Finbar Lynch's surly, disturbed model of male pugilism, McCann, are. driven by God knows what or whom.

They arrive to take Stanley away. The weird interrogation that they inflict on him, together with a birthday party that brings out the worst in their victim, is followed by offstage torture. Stanley emerges next morning to be driven away, speechless and dumbly gurgling, but a suited, shaven figure of convention.

"Don't let them tell you what to do," exclaims Meg's husband Petey, (Geoffrey Hutchings), throwing away the play's key and ironic line, that single murmur of protest against Stanley's kidnap. Despite Goldberg's involvement, this entire process strikes me as directly analogous to the Nazi's remorseless clearing out of Jews in raided villages in occupied Europe.

Peter McKintosh's imaginative staging, which makes the boarding house a weirdly highwalled place, festooned with creeping dirt and brown furniture, catches the right air of decay. Paul Ritter's miscast Stanley, in tune with Posner's light production, manifests none of the anxiety, fear and dread that ought to possess The Birthday Party.

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The Birthday Party