My second play, The Birthday Party, I wrote in 1958 - or 1957. It was totally destroyed by the critics of the day, who called it an absolute load of rubbish.

Harold Pinter is recalling the early reception of his second full-length play, The Birthday Party, written in the late 1950s and first staged in 1958. The play’s initial London run was famously short and met with largely hostile or baffled reviews, a common fate for Pinter’s early “comedy of menace” style, which resisted conventional realism and clear explanation. Pinter later contrasted that early critical dismissal with the play’s subsequent revival and canonization, using the episode to illustrate how quickly critical consensus can misread innovative work and how persistence matters in a writer’s career.

The remark combines dry self-deprecation with a pointed critique of critical authority. By emphasizing the critics’ contempt (“absolute load of rubbish”) and his own uncertainty about the exact year, Pinter frames the episode as both personally memorable and historically ironic: a work now regarded as a landmark of postwar British drama was initially treated as worthless. The quote underscores a recurring theme in Pinter’s public persona—skepticism toward received judgments and an insistence that art’s value may only become legible over time. It also hints at the risk inherent in formal innovation: audiences and reviewers often punish what they cannot readily categorize.