The Birthday Party

LITTLE DRUMMER BOY Stearns marches to his own beat.

Harold Pinter’s been ensconced as a master playwright for so long it’s easy to forget just how tortuous his early plays can be. Less absurdist than ambiguous, they’re works in which the protagonists are as unreliable as the antagonists, and the subject of a conflict is less important than the conflict itself.

The Birthday Party, Pinter’s first full-length play, amply demonstrates the style that would be famously (and repeatedly) called “comedy of menace.” Stanley, ostensibly a lapsed concert pianist, is a boarder in the seaside home of an older couple, the genial Petey and dotty Meg; sleeping all the time and rarely venturing outdoors, Stanley appears to be hiding from something. That something arrives in the form of Goldberg and McCann, a pair of genteel thugs who’ve tracked Stanley down, though to what end and on whose behalf remain unknown; their own provenance is as suspect as Stanley’s.

Director Snook’s well-managed, disturbingly funny revival conveys the proper sense of benighted dread, thanks in large part to Stearns, who makes clear the oppressive weight of Stanley’s burden without the benefit of being able to name it. Equally but much more oddly impressive is O’Dowd as the matron of the house; whether attempting to seduce Stanley over cornflakes or displaying an irrational fear of wheelbarrows (or is it perfectly rational—in this world, who can tell?), she maintains a childlike certitude. Meg arguably fares better than Stanley, who cracks not under the hooligans’ thumbs, but their words. In a slippery age when it’s argued that torture isn’t torture, that’s chillingly relatable.