Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1958) and The Dumb Waiter (1960) or the intermingling of farce and menace

Abstract

First used by the theatre critic Irving Wardle in a 1958 article, the expression comedy of menace has become a catch-all phrase systematically applied to Harold Pinter’s plays. Yet Wardle has offered a specific thematic and aesthetic definition of the genre based on the motif of the malevolent intrusion as well as on the paradoxical combination of comedy and menace. This paper will focus on the aesthetic definition of the genre, more precisely on the simultaneousness of nonsense and menace in The Birthday Party and of farce and menace in The Dumb Waiter. In these two plays, Pinter makes extensive use of nonsense and slapstick yet always endowing these comic devices with a sense of menace. Goldberg, McCann and Ben are indeed both clowns and oppressors and their use of physical comedy and whimsical language is as entertaining as it is unsettling, bringing to mind rather disquieting images of persecution and torture. This simultaneousness will however be qualified in terms of production and audience response since the comic might prevail over the menace and vice versa, leaving it to the reader-spectator to decide what genre the plays belong to.

Keywords

• Harold Pinter
• comedy of menace
• laughter
• black humour
• nonsense
• farce