The Birthday Party

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1957

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Summary

Background

Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I

Act II

Act III

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Boarding House

The entire play is set in the living room of Meg and Petey Boles’s boarding house, which is located in an English seaside resort town. The boarding house is important both as a setting and as a symbol of the identity crisis several of the characters will undergo during the course of the play: It is a strange, isolated space that is seemingly arrested in time for its tenants. Although there are certainly other rooms in the house (located offstage and mentioned frequently), the living room is claustrophobic and suffocating, with only a small window near the back door.

The house is a contradiction; while the surrounding sea and the beach are vast and open, the house remains insular and even potentially oppressive. The three inhabitants follow an endlessly repetitive cycle of daily life, in which only Petey seems to venture outside to work and socialize. Meg leaves only for shopping, and aside from briefly ducking outside to avoid Goldberg and McCann, Stanley doesn’t leave the house for the duration of the play until he is taken out at the end.

The boarding house demonstrates the way perception both shapes reality and undermines the concept of objective truth. To Meg, the house is full of promise and opportunities for happiness. Meg is proud of the house and insists that it is on the verge of popularity. She is therefore unsurprised to learn that two men have inquired about staying there, an event that Stanley reacts to with fear and foreboding. Stanley’s existence at the boarding house has been full of sleepless nights and anxiety, and he has been drinking heavily throughout his time there. He complains about Meg’s housekeeping and breakfasts, and the state of his room. However, the boarding house also provides a measure of safety for Stanley, at least up until the action of the play. It is a place where he hides from the world and from whatever responsibilities or consequences that Goldberg and McCann represent.

The daily routine and isolation have degraded Stanley’s sense of self until he no longer knows who he is. The narrative clarifies Stanley’s isolation when he points out that he has been the only guest for his yearlong stay; during this time, he has degenerated into someone who no longer takes part in social niceties or personal grooming, and, by his own admission, he drinks too much. This has changed his appearance far more than a year’s worth of aging. The three characters who live in the boarding house are all trapped there in one way or another, making time and the outer world insignificant. Nevertheless, only Stanley seems aware of his entrapment with nowhere to go.

The Drum

The drum is one of the play’s symbols, and first appears when Lulu brings a mysterious package into the Boles’s living room and places it on the table, warning Stanley not to touch it, although Stanley exclaims that he has no interest in it anyway. Meg presents it proudly to Stanley at the end of Act I as a birthday gift, although Stanley claims that it isn’t his birthday. The drum represents the way Meg uses Stanley and, at least in her imagination, shapes him into the person she wants him to be. Significantly, it is a child’s drum, which accords with how Meg treats Stanley as a son rather than as a boarder. Furthermore, although Stanley claims he has an offer to tour the world as a pianist, Meg suggests calmly that he stay instead of taking what would be a life-changing opportunity. She offers the drum as an odd, insufficient substitution—a gift that one might give to a young child or an amateur.

The regularity of the drumbeat represents the regularity of the daily routines that Meg is trying to force Stanley into, and Stanley’s acceptance of the drum seems to suggest his acceptance of this subjugation. Stanley plays the drum for Meg, which pleases her, but she is disturbed when Stanley’s steady tapping deteriorates into an unrestrained, off-rhythm, primal beating of the drum. This foreshadows that Meg’s daily rhythms and routines in the boarding house are about to be destroyed, and that Stanley is becoming less restrained and pliable in his behavior.

At the party, the drum becomes a part of Stanley’s unraveling. As McCann is tormenting Stanley during blind man’s buff, he breaks Stanley’s glasses and throws the drum under Stanley’s feet, causing Stanley to stumble over it and break it with his foot. These two actions take Stanley apart, and his next movement is to choke Meg, whose efforts have previously subdued him into the mundane order of the house. At the end of the play, Meg somehow has no memory of the party, including Stanley attacking her. She is surprised to see the broken drum and doesn’t realize it means that Stanley is also broken and that the domestic rhythms that she has constructed since his arrival cannot be repaired.

The Ritual of Breakfast

The motif of the breakfast ritual bookends the play, signifying the flux of the characters’ reality and their sense of self. At the beginning of Act I, the scene between Meg and Petey seems utterly normal at first. But Meg’s questions start to seem strange, pointless, and even childish, as do her enthusiastic responses to Petey’s patient replies. Their breakfast is a well-practiced ritual, in which Meg presents cornflakes and questions Petey, and Petey answers patiently and reads to her from the newspaper. This ritual is, however, disrupted in various ways by Stanley. Meg brings tea to Stanley’s room in the morning, then later wakes Stanley because she wants him to participate in the ritual as well, and he’s already late. Stanley further disrupts the ritual by complaining about everything Meg serves him. Meg doesn’t notice that Petey rebels against the ritual in his own quiet ways by not eating the fried bread and leaving before she serves tea. The ways in which all three characters interact with the breakfast ritual therefore reveal something about their relationships with one another and their own sense of self: Meg’s delusions about the state of her boarding house and marriage, Petey’s desire to maintain the peace by avoiding direct conflict, and Stanley’s futile rebellion against Meg’s imposed order.

At the beginning of Act III, Goldberg and McCann destroy the morning ritual entirely, just as they destroy Stanley. Act III begins similarly to Act I, but Meg can’t simply experience the usual back-and-forth with Petey, because she is concerned for Stanley and is worried about the car outside. Moreover, Meg is distraught that she has run out of cornflakes, and that Goldberg and McCann ate the hot breakfast she prepared, so she has none left for Petey or Stanley. Meg also doesn’t see that the newspaper has been torn to shreds by McCann, further undermining the breakfast ritual. When Meg comes back from shopping, Petey pretends that Stanley is still upstairs, allowing Meg to hold onto the illusion of their lives’ equilibrium. The reality of the destroyed breakfast ritual, however, suggests something in their lives and identities has changed irrevocably.