The Birthday Party was Harold Pinter's first professionally performed play. It was far from successful with the critics when it first opened in London in 1958 and closed after only one week. On critic alone recognised its qualities and described Pinter's talent as "most original, disturbing and arresting". Nowadays, twenty-five years later, on television, film or in the theatre, the writer is often found who hides menace and fear in everyday surroundings, amongst ordinary people. It is worth remembering that Pinter was among the first to re-explore this dramatic territory.

Pinter writes that the play may have been sparked off in his imagination by the grubby lodgings in which he was renting a room as an actor, and the even grubbier landlady who was running them. The story, of two men who come to "arrest" a young man, Stanley, who is staying in a boarding house, is open to more than one interpretation. Is Stanley, the artist, forced to conform, and join the dark-suited business community? Is the play an allegory of the all powerful political state crushing the intellectual? Is Stanley's birthday in fact his death day, and do we see an image of man gradually losing his power to communicate and ending up sightless, clutching his broken spectacles, unable even to communicate by meaningful speech any more?