ENGLISH THEATRE OF XIX AND XX
CENTURIES GROUP A
SURNAME:Giarratana NAME: Melania
HAROLD PINTER
ASHES TO ASHES
Ambassador Theatre, 12 September
1996, London, UK
The only two characters in this play are Devlin, a man in his forties
and Rebecca, a woman in her forties. During the development of the plot, if a
plot is possible in this play, we understand that they are married.
Rebecca is an insane woman; her insanity is not evident at the
beginning, because she seems to just be telling us in great
detail one of her love affairs to Devlin.
Devlin, seems a frustrated man, who is not able to understand his wife
and is obliged to bear her outlet.
The dialogue going on, Rebecca starts not to follow a logical line for
her speech; it is not possible to understand if she is talking about the past,
the present or the future. The clearer thing is that Devlin pulls out his real
nature: he is not a poor husband, victim of his wife but a man who does not
care about his wife’s past, he just has the egoistic interest to know if
his wife has betrayed him with another man. He does not understand that his
wife is insane because something happened in her past and the lack of
communication impeded her from tell her problems she had.
The play develops in a country house surrounded by a big garden; Pinter
let the reader know that there are two lamps, which never succeed in lighting
up the room and that by the end of the play the room and the garden are not
well defined. This is very important to interpret the meaning of the play.
Rebecca, in her delirium, touch a lot of important issues like the
Nazism with its barbarities: the children taken away from their mothers arms,
the sexual abuses the soldiers made on the women of the conquered countries and
the indifference that society has about the wars that still continue all over
the world.
Lights become lower and lower and the outlines of the things get less
and less defined: this means that human beings are getting alone and with no
hopes because of the indifference and the lack of communication among them; it
means that the world is fated to delirium if nothing changes.
The language used in this play is colloquial; the rhythm of the
dialogues is slow because there are long sentences and discourses but sometimes
become faster because of the use of shorter sentences. There are many pauses
and the reading could become boring in some moment because Rebecca does not
follow a logical discourse line.
The time is just the contemporary one, only that Pinter lets us know
about that. We also know at the beginning that it is in the early evening, an
unknown day, or an unknown year. This means that it could be adapted to every
period of human existence, which is full of wars, violence, abuses and
indifference.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Harold Pinter “Ashes to Ashes”
Auto-evaluation: Notable
Academic year 2005/2006
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés
López
© Melania Giarratana
megia@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia
Press