Representing excess is a paradoxical enterprise, which can potentially initiate new aesthetic dynamics. Such project is exemplified by the thematic interest for parties and their representation on the British contemporary stage. Historically, it appears that celebrations and drama have always been closely associated. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche explores such contiguity in Greek theatre, and so does François Laroque later, as he writes his essay on “Shakespeare’s festive world”, in which he analyses the dramatic structures of “Morris dances”, “folk plays”, and discusses “Masques” and “pageants” in the Elizabethan age. On the one hand, contemporary plays have maintained features of this once commonly shared moments of exuberance. Playwrights such as Caryl Churchill (in Top Girls) or Dennis Kelly (in Debris) do show the human body in action, expose its fluids, display a remarkable linguistic creativity, go beyond (ex-ceeds) normalising trends and question conventions as well as boundaries, thus retaining a carnivalesque manner. Yet, studying contemporary dramatists ranging from Samuel Beckett to David Storey through this thematic lens allows one to observe a gradual drabness in those once vibrant feasts described by Laroque. Sociologists like Dumazedier or Caillois have also observed a dilution of those periodic Dionysiac circumstances in the everyday life of the modern homo economicus. It turns out that excess is being redefined in the advent of a new, lacklustre, sometimes worrisome grey party, closer to the solemnity comprehended in the term “celebration”. In Krapp’s Last Tape, the main character leaves the stage to drink alone, and only a “loud pop of cork” is to be heard, a mere spectral recreation of former extravagance. Parties are even relocated offstage at times, like the wedding in The Contractor by David Storey, which takes place in the interval between act II and III. Eventually, the poetics of excess are reinvented. If parties are less and less colourful, how can they still be excessive? Where does excess, if any, lie? It seems to take a new, paradoxical form in the very process of becoming an object of representation as well as what should be excluded (suppressed?) from performance. Played against a backdrop of dullness and placed at a distance by the theatrical situation, these “paradoxical parties” result in unconventional celebrations in a renewed reception process. They articulate excess and lack, present the audience with disquieting characters and situations that cannot be accounted for. In Pinter’s “comedy of menace” The Birthday Party, poor Stanley “[is given] a party” - and quite a vengeful one - even though it remains impossible to guess what he did to deserve such festive punishment. Being staged, “in-yer-face” excess (as Aleks Sierz qualifies a trend of contemporary theatre) does not lead to pure enjoyment through complete self-abandonment and identification to stage action and characters, but, in the spirit of post-Brechtian dramaturgies, opens a space of critical distance that allows room for desire to be reintroduced and experienced.