Showing posts with label Teddy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Teddy. Show all posts

Saturday 18 February 2017

The Birthday Party – Pinter in Fourteen Tweets

The Birthday Party – Pinter in Fourteen Tweets

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


19 February

The Birthday Party – Pinter in Fourteen Tweets

To Roland Clare
(for publishing abroad ‘The Macbeth Murder Mystery’¹, and thus Thurber's wider delights)













Postlude :




As to The Homecoming, where, at the end of the play, Teddy goes back to the States just with the injunction Don't become a stranger, from his wife Ruth : we are first surprised with the proposition (after Teddy's brother Lenny has said Why don't I take her up with me to Greek Street ?) from Max, her father-in-law, We'll put her on the game. That's a stroke of genius, that's a marvellous idea.

Except that Ruth, given that Teddy has not seemed very interested (or even surprised) that Lenny, and then Joey, go to bed with her, is then freely bargaining, with Max and her brothers-in-law, in such terms as You would have to regard your original outlay simply as a capital investment [sc. setting Ruth up in a flat with three rooms and a bathroom]... :



In ‘Different Viewpoints in the Play’ (1982), an extract from his monograph Harold Pinter², Bernard F. Dekore suggests, on this point, Perhaps the devious Teddy did not introduce her to his family when they married but does so now because he expects to happen later when did not happen then.

Dekore goes on to say, If this is the reason for his homecoming, […] it could underlie Pinter’s statement (to John Lahr³) that ‘if ever there was a villain in the play, Teddy was it’ […]


End-notes :

¹ The piece first appeared in The New Yorker (p. 16 of the edition dated 2 October 1937), as linked here.


² In the Modern Dramatists series [Macmillan, London (1982)], and collected in the selection of critical essays Harold Pinter : The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and The Homecoming (ed. Michael Scott) (Macmillan, London (1986)).

³ ‘A Director’s Approach’ by Peter Hall, in A Casebook on Harold Pinter’s ‘The Homecoming’, p. 20 (ed. John Lahr) (New York, 1971).




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)