Harold Pinter

Ashes to ashes

Faber and Faber, 1996, London

Characters:

The only physical reference of characters that Harold Pinter gives us is their age.

Devlin: He is in his forties, so we are supposed to imagine him as a good and healthy, adult man. Maybe a little bit heavy because of his age and with some grey hair. We know that he is able to hypnotise Rebecca, so it means he has a soft voice and he may be a psychologist. Because of the way he treats Rebecca, we deduce he is a very patient and loving husband who is willing to know his wife.

Rebecca: She is also on her forties, but she has been worse treated by life. She went through hard situations as we are told in the play, so we can imagine her as a fragile and thin woman. Sometimes she acts a little bit childish, as someone who needs to be protected. Her memories are slightly messed up and many times she speaks in an incoherent way. She talks about past a lover relating him to the pain she used to feel; that’s why we deduce her mind may not be very clear or she may just has a dark personality.

Plot:

The play begins with Rebecca talking to Devlin about an unknown man who treated her bad. Despite of it, she thinks he used to adore her. She confesses these memories because she is being hypnotised by her husband. The unknown man’s actions, job and even physical details are hazy in her memory, but she talks as if they were great lovers in the past. She remembered when this man used to “tear babies from the arms of their screaming mothers”. Devlin feels he has the right to be angry about all her secrets, but he loves her. They keep talking about trivial things, and suddenly she reveals she used to have a baby, which she lost when a train inspector took it away from her after “they” took her and more people to “the trains”.

Space:

The play takes place in their house. The room can be anywhere with some chairs, because the author says that Rebecca is sitting. It must be a private space like a studio, living room or bedroom, because they are having an important conversation and a hypnosis session. The rest of the world space doesn’t matter; everything that counts is Rebecca and her memories. However, the playwright specifies that their house is placed in the country, with a garden beyond.

Time:

We are told that the time is “now”, so they are having a conversation in the present, and we can consider as present any period in time because the historical facts are not explicit. We also find several flash backs because their conversation is about Rebecca’s past. As flashbacks are obtained by hypnosis, the past is narrated in present tense; however, every jump to the past is coherent.

Literary and stylistic sources:

The language they use is colloquial but without vulgarisms. It’s not elaborated so is easily understandable because their conversations pretend to be as natural as a normal husband-wife talk. However, there are a lot of things unsaid in this play. Sometimes the phrases are incomplete and it’s hard to find the connexion between ideas and facts; in this way, we are induced to create our own metal plot.

It is interesting how the author uses light intensity along the play as a stylistic source; because as the narration goes on the light should go darker, and suddenly it should intensifies when the truth is shown by the end of the play.

Personal point of view:

The kind of conversation this couple have draws a dark background, even when we know that they live in a comfortable house in the country and that they are talking during a summer evening. We know about war-time and its painful scenes, that’s why it is so easy to relate their conversation with that terrible past. Hideous situations in Rebecca’s memory have turn her into what she is now; and have an important influence in her marriage, in a way that made her keep many secrets -like her lost baby- to her husband, the one who is supposed to be her confident.

Harold Pinter shows us through Rebecca, the wisdom of our minds which transform our memories in order to make them less painful. Moreover, the memories brought back to surface indicate that it is possible to keep on living after war, but it’s impossible to forget.

Academic year 2005/2006
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Ivonne Pamela Landázuri
ilanbe@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press