TEHRAN-Helal Ahmar Theater in Rasht, Gilan Province, is hosting the play “The Birthday Party” written by Harold Pinter on its stage.

Directed by Masoud Lotfi, the play has Maral Eghbal, Pedram Parichehreh, Sogand Ramezani, Hossein Majzoub, Pouya Yeilaghi, and Mohammad Mehdi Yousefizadeh in the cast.

“The Birthday Party” is the first full-length play by Harold Pinter, first published in London in 1959. It is one of his best-known and most frequently performed plays.

It is about Stanley Webber, an erstwhile piano player who lives in a rundown boarding house run by Meg and Petey Boles, in an English seaside town, “probably on the south coast, not too far from London”. Two sinister strangers, Goldberg and McCann, arrive looking for him, supposedly on his birthday, and turn his apparently innocuous birthday party, organized by Meg, into a nightmare.

The play has been classified as a comedy of menace, characterized by Pinteresque elements such as ambiguous identity, confusions of time and place, and dark political symbolism.

Harold Pinter (1930-2008) was a British playwright, screenwriter, director, and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. 

His best-known plays include “The Birthday Party,” “The Homecoming” (1964), and “Betrayal” (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works.

Performed every night at 8 p.m., “The Birthday Party” will remain on stage at the Helal Ahmar Theater through May 16.

SS/SAB