The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter

An analysis of a scene in the play involving a conversation between three characters: Nat Goldberg, Seamus Mccann and Stanley Webber.

The paper gives an overview of the play by describing the setting and the characters in the play. It then describes and analyzes the conversation that takes place where Goldberg and Mccann interrogate Webber.
“As was mentioned before, the conversation is an example of foregrounding. Pinter designs it such that the audience knows what is transpiring as (or even before) it takes place. The lack of conversational niceties helps create that mood, as do the several neutral tokens, self and other oriented tokens. The construction of the conversation is to fire queries at Webber so as to break him down. One might imagine the skill it took actors to bring Pinter’s imagination to fruition. The accusations, the physical aspersions, the absurdities and the tokens are cleverly interspersed to give this inquisition an unrelenting quality.”