The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter: character analysis

   

Stanley Webber 

Until his enemies Goldberg and McCann appear, Stanley is the only lodger at the Boles’ run-down seaside boarding house. The basis of his relationship to Goldberg and McCann, is never fully revealed, but their coming finally destroys Stanley’s mark of self-control. Near the play’s end, when they have reduced him to insanity, they haul him off in Goldberg’ s car to face the ‘‘Monty,” some vague, ominous fate. 

Stanley, in his late-thirties, is an unemployed musician, reluctant to leave the boarding house, which has become a kind of refuge from ‘‘them,” the nebulous persecutors who, in the past, destroyed his career as a concert pianist. He has grown both untidy and aimless, and although he fantasizes about playing in great cities on a world tour, he has no real hope. Lacking a piano, he cannot even practice. 

Stanley’s dread of what lies beyond the boarding house traps him in a trying relationship with Meg, for whom he must act as both wayward child and surrogate husband. He is not always able to mask his disgust with this relationship and is prone to express his contempt for her in cruel verbal jibes and petty behavior. He also teases her. For example, he tells her that ‘‘they” are coming in a van with a wheelbarrow, looking for someone to haul off, presumably Meg. His hostility finally takes a more violent form, when, during the birthday party, he tries to strangle her but is stopped by McCann and Goldberg. 

Stanley, the nominal protagonist of The Birth day Party, barely struggles against his persecutors, quickly succumbing as if before some inevitable doom. Although he never evidences any guilt for his betrayal of the unspecified cause, he responds to his inquisitors as if he knows that there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. At the end, although unable to voice his feelings, he seems resigned to his unknown fate.

 

Meg Boles

Petey’ s wife, Meg Boles is a good-natured woman in her sixties. If only from a lack of any reference to offspring of her own, it is implied that she and Petey are childless, thus she fills the emptiness in her life by turning the Boles’s boarding-house tenant, Stanley Webber, into a kind of surrogate child. She insists on calling him ‘‘boy and mothering him. She even takes liberties appropriate to a parent.

At the same time, Meg flirts with Stanley, trying to fill a second void in her life. Her marriage to Petey has settled into mechanical routine, as their listless and inane dialogue that opens the play reveals. Meg tries to win Stanley’s approval of her as a woman, shamelessly fishing for compliments. Stanley, in his mildly perverse manner, responds by teasing her, knowing that she is both vulnerable and gullible.

As the play progresses, it becomes clear that Meg, though a mental lightweight, is a decent woman. She is also rather sentimental. Although it is probably not even Stanley’s real birthday, she insists that it is, determined to help Stanley outlook his self-destructive despondency. She also seems to be his last hope, and her absence when he is taken away near the end of the play intensifies her broken heart.

 

Petey Boles

Like his wife, Petey Boles is in his sixties. He is a deck-chair attendant at the unidentified seaside resort where he and Meg own their boarding house. Petey is dull and ambitionless, no more inclined than his wife to find challenges beyond the confines of their boarding house. The pair have simply settled into a humdrum existence appropriate to their mundane minds.

Because it is his chess night, Petey is not present during the birthday party. He leaves before it begins, then appears the following morning, when he makes a feeble attempt to prevent Goldberg and McCann from taking Stanley away, though he backs down when the two men suggest that they might take him as well. Petey’s decency is finally as ineffectual as Meg’s. At the play’s conclusion, he can do nothing but slip back into vapid conversation with his wife, who reveals that she was not even aware that he had completely missed the party. 

 

Nat Goldberg 

Nat Goldberg, in his fifties, is the older of the two strangers who come to interrogate and intimidate Stanley before taking him away. He is a charming character, a gentleman in appearance and demeanor. He is nostalgic, too. He fondly and affectionately recalls his family and events in his early life. He also insists that Meg and the others honor Stanley with a birthday party.

Goldberg’s soft-heartedness is, however, pure fake. His outward charm and polite manner conceal a sadistic nature. This cruelty is first revealed in his initial interrogation of Stanley. His ugliness is further betrayed by his unspecified carnal use of Lulu, who complains the morning after the party that Goldberg subjected her to some deviant sexual experiences inappropriate even for wives. It is this discrepancy between Goldberg’ s calm appearance and his vicious interior that makes him the more sinister of Stanley’ s two persecutors. 

 

Lulu 

Described as a “girl in her twenties,” Lulu is a neighbor who first appears carrying Stanley’s birth day present, the toy drum and drum sticks that Meg had bought for him. On the flirtatious side, she is self-conscious about her sexual appeal and cannot sit still for long without taking out a compact to powder her face. To her looks are obviously important, and she sees Stanley as a “washout” because he seems to care nothing about his unkempt appearance. Behind her glamour, there is some youthful innocence to Lulu. She is blind to Goldberg’ s predatory nature and is drawn into his charm. She sits on his lap and flirts with him, a foreshadowing of what occurs between them later that night. That she is some sort of sexual sacrifice is also suggested in the conclusion to the bizarre events that take place when the lights go out during the party. When they are restored, she is revealed “lying spread-eagle on the table,” with Stanley hunched over her giggling insanely. In the last act, Lulu seems broken by the night’s experiences, but she was also angry. 

 

Dermont McCann 

McCann, in his thirties, is Goldberg’s younger associate. Unlike Goldberg, who reveals a Jewish heritage, McCann is a immoral Irish Catholic, possibly a defrocked priest. Like Goldberg, he exercises careful self-control, a quality which contributes to the sinister impression of both men. He is also methodical and compulsive, as is revealed in his ritual habit of carefully tearing Petey’s newspaper into strips. He differs from Goldberg in important respects, however. More reticent, he is not as superficially warm or outgoing, and when he does speak he seems more inclined to echo Goldberg than to offer new observations. He is also physically more intimidating than Goldberg, who deliberately covers his viciousness with a mask of fatherly interest in the others and disarms everyone with his nostalgia. It is McCann who shoves Stanley at the party and snaps and breaks his glasses. When he does talk, McCann usually just adapts to the mood set by Goldberg. Usually, too, he defers to Goldberg’s age and authority, even obeying the older man’s peculiar request. However, at times he seems more Goldberg’ s equal partner, especially during the interrogations of Stanley, when, just as voluble, he become Goldberg’ s co-inquisitor.