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The Birthday Party
 "It's a beast... it turns into this beast of a thing," actor Gerrard McArthur reiterates of Harold Pinter's 'The Birthday Party', one of the English writers best known pieces of work.
We'd caught up in the comforting confines of the spacious, grey, and dank and musty confines of the Queens Theatre; where I'd walked in on the cast having a mid-rehearsal lunch break. As I find out later, they were busily working though the music beds, which in itself was a new vista for a Pinter production. I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me beforehand; a Pinter play - one of the cornerstones of the 'Absurdist' movement - is not the sort of thing where you just slot in a nice score beneath the action. As with Pinter and his terse writing, and his legendarily direct and immediately detailed stage directions, every piece of the action - and music - needs be thought out and matched to the on stage portrayal and intent of the story. There's little room for mis-interpretation. The man for the job, as it happens, was at hand here in Adelaide, in the form of Quentin Grant, known to all and sundry as 'Quincy'...
'The Birthday Party', McArthur opines, is "...a great play. The more you go into it the more it expands because it's such an incredibly well written piece."
And in some ways, it doesn't seem like a very complex play. "It seems like he's got a link from his unconscious straight onto the page. 'The Birthday Party' just has this resonance of things behind it all the time. The characters seem incredibly iconic for some reason."
Set in a small boarding house on the English seaside, it's the story of the mysteriously grey Stanley, a quiet lodger, about whom we know almost nothing. As we learn more we learn that we cannot accept anything we are told as fact. "The characters have this dystopia that becomes more and more apparent as the play goes on."
Gerrard McArthur is here playing the role of Goldberg at the invitation of Director David Mealor, whom he first met as a cast member of Brink Productions, when he (McArthur) was in Australia performing in Howard Barker's 'The Ecstatic Bible' for Brink. A friendship was kept up, and when Mealor asked him to come back he readily accepted the role of Goldberg, having previously played Stanley on stage.
Goldberg and McCann are gangsters - or seem to be gangsters... "Do they know Stanley? Have they known him before? Are they connected with his past in any way?" McArthur fires the vexing questions back at me.
Then there's the landlady Meg, her husband Petie, and Lulu, the good time girl from next door. McArthur chuckles, not for the first time. "There's a lot of playing with these genre types, and we know there's something else that we're waiting to find out about them. It's unwittingly narcotic for the audience for as much as we find out we realize we don't really know that much about them."
It is Pinter's great strength that he reveals just as much as he wants the audience to know, the tension tightening as the play goes on. McArthur, an Englishman born of Irish parents, likes to play that game too.The man whose first read Pinter as a 13 year old and who happily confesses, "I read this play - grabbed it off the shelf - and didn't have much of a clue where he was coming from. But it's the first play I ever read!"
He leans back in his seat and an uneasy pause ensues. Later I feel as though he were a predator contemplating his victim, before he leans forward again.
"It has an incredible power by not confirming anything," he measures the words. "You never know anything, and yet the grip it enacts around your mind or your imagination gets stronger and stronger and stronger.
"We find that 50 years later that the arbitrariness of it - the execution of process - has a very great resonance right now," he says, instancing the war on terror. I can see the point he's making, but it's a bit of a long bow, save that Pinter was always interested in the ideas of individual liberty and the rights of political protest.
Pinter wrote his debut play 'The Birthday Party' in 1957, when Britain was still a grim shattered mess in the aftermath of WW2. There was considerable unemployment, a number of her principal cities still required rebuilding, and demobbed and unemployed soldiers were a common enough sight. Pinter himself knew a thing or two about the rights of the individual. He was the son of Eastern European Jews who had registered as a conscientious objector when he was called up for his national service.
To me, one of Pinter's great themes was internecine warfare, class warfare, of like against like in the struggle for primacy.
"There's always an aggression," McArthur notes simply. "There's a kind of 'look behind you!' element to it. There's a very alien force invading normalcy. They are invading Meg and Petey's domicile." Pinter builds the tension, and builds the power in his plays relentlessly, in the way of a hulking and looming black shadow behind his characters. In the way of a stereotypical horror film set, the Queens Theatre would appear to fit the bill perfectly. "It's great to be back here, it suits the play and it suits the ideas expressed in it. It rises to the occasion," he says with a smile.
"Oh yeah," he perks up immediately, as I refer to the music. "David played me some of his suggestions when I first arrived and they're just brilliant."
Does a soundtrack work with Pinter, I question?
"It's a... bold move... by Mealor," he laughs. "So we'll find out. At the moment we're working with that now, finding what works and what doesn't. So the answer is 'we don't know'. Every single thing in a Pinter play has to be placed, every body and space, every implement on the table... so the music too has to be absolutely placed. It'll be enthralling to see how it unfolds."
Somewhat later that day, having thought about things a bit, Gerrard McArthur text messages me, recalling a Pinter quotation which he felt summed things up. "The play is a comedy because the whole state of affairs is absurd and inglorious. It is, however, as you know, a very serious piece of work."
Alex Wheaton
'The Birthday Party' opens in the Queens Theatre (off Light Square) on Sat 5 May. See the Prize Frenzy(tm)
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