The Birthday Party

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.