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Winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize and the author of The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal, Harold Pinter has earned the reputation as, in the words of Newsweek's Jack Kroll, "the most fascinating, enigmatic, and accomplished dramatist in the English language."
Set in a police state, Mr. Pinter's 1984 award-winning play is
a chilling study of power and powerlessness.
Nicolas, a government inquisitor, engages members of a family, husband Victor, wife Gila and young son Nicky, not so much to elicit facts as to administer brutality. The sense of terror is visited upon the audience with uncommon force. While pouring himself a succession of whiskies, Nicolas toys sadistically with his victims, invoking a righteous stream of justification for the state's behavior; from patriotism to keeping "the world clean for God." |
One for the Road Cover illustration
by Andrzej Klimowski
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"My earlier plays were perhaps metaphors for states of affairs in various respects. This is not a metaphor about anything - it's just a brutal series of facts."
Harold Pinter
discussing One for the Road
Since the searing play One for the Road opened in 1984, Pinter has returned to the theme of torture, both as a playwright (Partytime , Mountain Language) and an activist. In 1985, Pinter and Arthur Miller traveled to Turkey on a humanitarian mission to support Turkish writers who had been imprisoned and tortured. And in 1988, Pinter met Beckett's inspiration for Catastrophe, the jailed Czech dissident, Vaclav Havel. While Pinter's activist sympathy lies with the sufferers of torture, as a writer, he explores what drives torturers, as well as methods they employ to strip prisoners of their humanity.
www.haroldpinter.org |
