More Than a Boarding House: Generation of Heterotopia in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party

One of the pioneering playwrights of postwar British drama, Harold Pinter is usually known for his plays’ absurd features and for his combination of elements like comedy and threat in an unprecedented way. Nevertheless, Pinter’s ingenuity cannot merely be confined to such a specific framework, and this paper explores a rather neglected main dramatic element in his most well-known and commonly-studied play The Birthday Party (1959). Taking Michel Foucault’s definition of heterotopia into consideration, this paper analyses the specific selection of a boarding house as the setting of the play and focuses on the spatial markers’ contribution to the ambiguity intentionally engendered by the playwright. Meanwhile, the status of the boarding house put under scrutiny reveals the perfectly heterotopic nature of the place. The boarding house in the play hosts a spectrum of contradictory places in its complicated constitution such as a delivery room, a hideout, a womb, and a playground. In this sense, the boarding house constitutes a catalyser which Pinter employs to further blur the relationships and the dialogue between the characters. This study, investigating all these heterotopic features in detail, once again marks the undeniable influence of the setting on the action and dialogue in a play. By putting an emphasis on the heterotopic features of the setting in The Birthday Party, it underlines the significance of the setting in denying the revelation of a unique and simple conclusion and promoting multiple ways of reading the play.