The Birthday Party Review: An Invitation Into The World Of Memory Loss
Harold Pinter’s play keeps its absurdist elements but is beautifully recontextualised to depict the tragedies of dementia and Alzheimers.
Photo by Katie Burge
If it was possible, I’d want Katie Wrench’s recontextualised production of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party to be mandatory viewing for anyone caring for someone with dementia or Alzheimer’s. Having a grandparent who suffers from dementia, I dread the day that I become unrecognisable to a person I love so dearly. It’s why, candidly, Katie Wrench’s directorial decision to depict Stanley Webber as a sufferer of dementia and the production’s decision to raise money for Dementia UK have struck a personal chord with me.
This nuanced reimagining asks its audience to see the neglectful behaviours that shadow the care system. Rather than being allowed to assert his own identity, Stanley is infantilised and commandeered. No one understands him. Not Meg or Petey Boles who he interacts with every day, as they manage his routine, not Lulu, a young nurse who calls on him, and certainly not the two mysterious men who come knocking one day, disturbing an already bleak status quo. Sadly, as the chaos of the disease encroaches, Stanley loses all tangibility of himself too. But, let me start at the beginning. Because that’s what makes sense. Or, as Pinter would ask, does it?
“Though Stanley’s demise is palpable, what I valued in this production was a commitment to remain sensitive to the subject at hand.”
The play opens with the sickly-sweet Meg, stunningly characterised by Maia von Malaisé, and the affable Petey Boles (Jake Leigh) at the breakfast table. The methodical folding of napkins, the robotic lacklustre look in their eyes, the repetition of monotonous questions (you’ll tire of hearing the word ‘nice’!) and the incessant stichomythia affirms mundaneness. It seems that every morning, Meg commandeers the dining room, distributing fried bread and cornflakes as if she’s cooked a 5-star Michelin dish. While the scene is particularly amusing, due to the sharp comedic timing of von Malaisé and Leigh, it’s also the first that we note of her insecurity and neuroticism as a coping mechanism for her overbearing worry for Stanley.
We’re led to question this initial reality when Stanley appears from his room. Immediately, the music scratches and quietens to an almost imperceptible grating that Wrench expertly uses to emulate the discordant sounds of dementia in the brain. Notably, this is later contrasted by ‘trigger’ sounds like the sharp banging of a tambourine or a low whistle to bring him out of his paranoid and spaced-out states. Gabriel Owens adequately expresses Stanley’s initial frustration; he aggressively accosts Meg on her announcement of the ‘two sinister strangers’ and this is where the mundanity begins to unravel.
Though Stanley’s demise is palpable, what I valued in this production was a commitment to remain sensitive to the subject at hand. Too often, absurdist fiction can become creepy, exploitative, and violent, particularly in the depiction of mental health issues. Despite there being a few times where the script veers away from an applicability to dementia, there was an overall meticulous subtlety to Wrench’s directorial craft, contrary to the chaos and nightmarish scenes of Pinter’s writing. The attention to minute detail was a clever way to signpost the worsening condition of Stanley and the fragility of the other characters too. From Stanley’s face on the sign outside his room slowly contorting to emulate the ‘Lose Face’ poster above the kitchen table, to Meg's shopping bag emblazoned “Fill me up with things again and again”, echoing the play’s themes of an obsession with normalcy and the pandemonium that ensues when this is disrupted. There were so many other impeccable instances of detail, but I’ll leave you to spot them!
These wonderful elements, including the cast, set and sound design (Ben Nicolson), worked cohesively to portray an unreliability and fluidity in space and time that Pinter himself would have marvelled at. The role switches which occur, particularly between the ominous duo of McCann and Goldberg (played by Rob Monteiro and Joseph Wolffe), were seamless and effective. Decisions like these made Wrench’s Birthday Party an invitation into the world of disorientation experienced by those with dementia, where names mean nothing as people and places blur together within The Corpus Playroom. An extensive and detailed performance that had me laughing one minute and pondering the fragility of human life the next, I can’t express enough how much I enjoyed ‘The Birthday Party’.
The Birthday Party is playing at The Corpus Playroom until Saturday 3rd February.