The Birthday Party

Theater critic Martin Esslin includes Pinter in his seminal 1961 text, Theatre of the Absurd, in which he coins the term absurdism to describe the trend found in the work of several playwrights in the 1950’s and 60’s, including Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Edward Albee, and Jean Genet. These playwrights were all influenced by the philosophy of absurdism as set forth in French philosopher Albert Camus’s 1942 essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” In the essay, Camus argues that existence is meaningless and that humanity is like Sisyphus in ancient Greek mythology, whom Zeus sentenced to endlessly roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back to the bottom each time. Camus argues that since life is devoid of meaning, the absurd occurs when the innate human desire for meaning comes face-to-face with the meaningless of an illogical world.

The works of the absurdist playwrights signify a sense of disillusionment in a postmodern world. While each playwright expressed these ideas differently, Harold Pinter’s style and aesthetics became so iconic as to earn the term Pinteresque, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as, “typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses.