Teacher: Vicente Forés
Course: Filología Inglesa
I
Harold Pinter, The
Collection
Aldwych Theatre, London, 18th
June
1962
Directed by Peter Hall and Harold
Pinter
Michael Hordern as
“Harry”
Kenneth Haigh as
“James”
Barbara Murray as
“Stella”
John Ronane as “Bill”
This
play has four characters: Harry, James, Stella, and Bill. Harry is a man
in his
forties, he has a house in Belgravia, and he lives with his friend Bill in a
shared house; Bill is man is his twenties (he is good-looking), he is a
dress
designer who lives with his friend Harry in his house, he smokes, he is
a very
astute and charismatic person and he has established a secret affective
relationship with Stella; James is a man in his thirties, he is a
propietary,
he has a flat in Chelsea, where lives with his wife Stella, he smokes
too, and
he is a very jealous person; and Stella is a woman in her thirties, she is
another dress designer, she lives with her husband in his flat, she has
a white
Persian kitten and she has had a secret affective relationship with
Bill.
The
stage has three areas: stage left is Harry’s house in Belgravia
(elegant, well
furnishing), with the living-room, the hall, the front door and a
staircase to
first floor; stage right is James’s flat in Chelsea (contemporary
furnishing),
with only the living-room and offstage right there are other rooms and the
front door; and a promontory that is a telephone box.
The
play begins with a “strange voice” asking Harry for Bill (who is
sleeping), the
voice is James, who has discovered the special relationship between his wife
and Bill. So, James begins to feel upset and he goes sometimes to Harry’s house to talk with Bill. There, Bill
and him
have a very interesting conversation (with certain “winks” of homosexuality)
where James discovered that Bill had the same interests he had, and he
began to
respect him; Bill told James that the relationship he had had with
James’s wife
has not importance because he had not made nothing bad; next, Harry met
Stella
and he told her how Bill was and how he had been before, while, at Harry’s
house, James and Bill are having another conversation. However, the
conversation does not finishes like James wanted, and he hurts Bill’s hand
voluntarily with a sharp knife, so, Harry enters into the house.
Finally, Bill
tells the truth to James and Harry (Bill and James’s wife had not had any
sexual relationship, they had only talked about it), and James returns
to his
home feeling more upset, but this time because his wife. The only
reference of
the title with the content of the play is that The Collection
refers to
a collection of Chinese pots that Bill had.
There
are not any temporal references, the only thing we can see is that the
furniture is contemporary and there are telephones. However, the
continuity of
the play is evident: in the beginning of the play, the time reference is
“late
al night” (Harry says that “it’s four o’clock in the morning”); the next
scenes
are “in the morning”, here,
Harry and
Bill are at Harry’s house while James and Stella are at James’s flat;
and the
time continues with a perfect cohesion.
The
language of the characters is not very complex, however, the vocabulary
used by
them is so sophisticated (they are middle/upper-class people) as we see in
examples from the conversation between Bill and James like the word
“scrumptious”.
The
true treasure of this play is the complexity of the conversations
between Bill
and James, a very intensive and expressive, but this is only since my
point of
view.