Cast pretty much Pinter perfect

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
(Royal Exchange, Manchester)

IT doesn’t do to read too much into the enigmatic works of Harold Pinter. Try and you will almost always fall foul of any arbitrary personal rule about what theatre is supposed to be.

Pinter’s characters are ciphers, his dialogue is fractured and without pointers (indeed actually misleading), his locations are ambiguous and his plots pretty much non-existent. And yes, as with Beckett, this is deliberate and as a result, often hard-going.

The Birthday Party is a bit like watching a situation comedy written by the Krays: it has some laughs, but they are curiously unpleasant ones: with good Pinter there is always the thought that you might end up with a hand nailed to the floor for laughing at them.

The Birthday Party was Pinter at his early, enigmatic peak in 1957. His second full-length play, it is set, maybe, in a seaside boarding house where Stanley (Ed Gaughan) is a physical and emotional mess perhaps from some earlier offstage misdemeanour, cooed over by the landlady, Meg (Maggie Steed), and treated kindly by the (almost normal among this crowd) Petey of Paul McCleary.

Into this relative calm come Goldberg (Desmond Barrit) and McCann (Keith Dunphy), apparently on a mission to correct Stanley’s past misdeeds or throw him a birthday party; and briefly the attractive Lulu (Danusia Samal), whom Stanley attacks in a mad breakdown.

The play ends with Stanley zombie-like and easily led, the opposite of his previous character. So the play is about the grinding down of the little man by powerful forces, maybe? Perhaps and perhaps not; Pinter is about the experience and what the individual draws from it, nothing more. The ending remains elusive and inconclusive.

Along the way this cast does a generally terrific job, led by Desmond Barrit as a powerfully sinister Goldberg and Steed as the almost brainless Meg.

If there is a problem it is perhaps that director Blanche McIntyre plays the whole thing a little too much for laughs, but there is no doubting the cast’s mastery of the fractured nature of the dialogue.

You might not enjoy it, but that’s Pinter: many viewers, many fans, many detractors.