The Birthday Party (1957) is the second full-length play by Harold Pinter and one of his best-known and most frequently performed plays. After its hostile London reception almost ended Pinter’s playwriting career, it went on to be considered ‘a classic’.

The play is about Stanley, an erstwhile piano player in his 30s, who lives in a shabby boarding house, run by Meg and Petey, in an English seaside town, ‘probably on the south coast, not too far from London’. Meg organises a birthday party for Stanley, but two sinister strangers, Goldberg and McCann, who appear to have come looking for him, turn the seemingly innocuous birthday party into a nightmare.

Showing 1-2 April and 5-9 April