Meg is married to
Petey, and is the keeper of the guesthouse at which
Stanley has stayed for a year in
Pinter's magnificent beast of a play,
The Birthday Party. Primarily she is stupid, ignorant, and serves as a counterpoint to
Stanley's sensitivity. She is stupid on a
gargantuan scale. She has the social grace of an
ox, and Pinter manipulates her caricature skillfully to grate the audience's nerves at moments of massive tension. She is truly
grotesque.
Too stupid to see through Goldberg and McCann, the'two gentlemen' are only notable for being visitors at her guesthouse. There have been so few visitors at the guesthouse that Stanley forces us to speculate whether or not it really is such a thing. She gets hideously drunk at the party itself, and despite being Meg, a Woman, in her fifties and the presence of Lulu, says of the party 'I was the belle of the ball. ( pause ) I was. ( pause ) I know I was.'- these final lines of the play show that despite the cataclysmic events of that night she is blissfully unaware of anything other than herself. As a caricature there is little to say about Meg other than that she irritates the hell out of me.