The Birthday Party is the first full-length play by Harold Pinter. Although it is now one of Pinter's best-known plays , The Birthday Party was a commercial and mostly critical failure when originally performed at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, in 1958. After the play closed, however, Harold Hobson's review rescued its critical reputation, and it went on to become one of the classics of the modern stage and one of the most-frequently produced of Pinter's plays.