Fiero is a Ph. D., now retired, who formerly taught drama and play writing at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. In this essay he discusses The Birthday Party as a work of anti-text, pure theater that gains great power at points where language fails or simply eludes logical analysis.

If, as the poet Wallace Stevens maintained, there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, there ought to be at least as many ways of looking at a play. There are really, however, only two essential perspectives: one which views the play as a literary text, and the other which views the play as a script to be performed. Judged strictly from the first perspective, Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party remains an impassable mote to trouble the critical eye, while, from the second perspective, it seems a powerful stage vehicle, capable, metaphorically speaking, of slicing through an...