Birthday Party Critical quotes Flashcards
Pintu Karak on Meg’s ingrained misogyny
“Meg is born and bred up in a society which prioritizes a boy over a girl. The desire to give birth to a male child is thus rooted in her sub-conscious psyche. “
Martin Esslin on Meg & Stanley
“Meg treats him with a motherliness so stifling as to be almost incestuous.”
Simon O Lesser
“Meg represents female domesticity”
Sean McAvoy on Goldberg’s manner
“rhetorical assurance seems to dazzle everyone into submission”
Harold Pinter on speech
“is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempt to keep ourselves to ourselves”
Michael Billington on McCann
“the classic organisation man terrified by the unpredictable”
Michael Esslin on absurdism
“In a world that has become absurd, the theatre of the absurd is the most realistic comment on, the most accurate reproduction of reality”
Ronald Knowles on ‘the organisation’
“Just when Pinter was working as an actor, the IRA threat was prevalent, particularly for theatregoers… the ‘Organisation’ was a well-known euphemism for the IRA”
Ronald Knowles on menace and comedy
“in the course of the play laughter is provoked by what is ultimately frightening.”
Bill Naismith on conformity
“Goldberg and McCann… represent the Judaeo-Christian tradition in Western civilisation that demands conformity towards family, state and church.”
Bill Naismith on threat
“Goldberg and McCann echo a hugely pervasive idea in Western Culture: if you don’t behave, somebody will come and get you.”
Pinter on silences
“There are two silences. One where no word is spoken. The others where perhaps a torrent of language is being employed…the speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear…”
