SOURCE: Campbell, James. “The Slow Unbaffling of the Pinterwatchers.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4747 (25 March 1994): 18.

In the following review, Campbell praises The Birthday Party for its effective humor and tone of menace. Campbell comments that The Birthday Party is “seen as one of the defining plays of post-war theatre.”

The Birthday Party brought the Theatre of the Absurd into the English living-room, introducing Vladimir and Estragon to Jimmy Porter. Its original London run, at the Lyric, Hammersmith in 1958, lasted less than a week, but now it is seen as one of the defining plays of the post-war theatre, and the new production at the National, directed by Sam Mendes, has a very faint whiff of the museum about it. Pinter's latest play, the difficult, elliptical Moonlight, played to thin houses during its recent West End run, with baffled customers leaving halfway through, wondering what it was all about. No...