The classic Harold Pinter play The Birthday Party continues the current season at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre from June 5 to July 6.
A surreal celebration where nothing is certain, the drama centres on Stanley Webber. He is possibly a pianist. He is lodging at Meg and Petey Boles’s seedy boarding house in an English seaside town—possibly on the South Coast.
It is also possibly Stanley’s birthday, although he’s adamant it’s not. When two sinister strangers, Goldberg and McCann, arrive to stay and demand a celebration, his birthday party turns into a nightmare.
The Birthday Party was Nobel Prizewinner Pinter’s first produced full-length play that went on to become one of his best-known and most popular.
It is directed here by Blanche McIntyre (winner of the Critics Circle Most Promising Newcomer 2011).
The cast includes Maggie Steed as Meg. Ed Gaughan plays Stanley and was last seen at the Royal Exchange in the Lyric Hammersmith and Filter Theatre’s critically-acclaimed version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.