Subject: # 14227 Teatro Inglés Siglos XIX y XX Grupo A

Author: Harold Pinter

Play: Ashes to ashes

Subtitle: N/A

Publisher: Faber and faber

This play was first performed in 1996 at the Ambassadors Theatre, London.

There are only two characters in this play: Devlin and Rebecca. The former is a very insecure man, he wants to know everything about the past of his lover: Rebecca. Anyway, this character is not of much importance as we don’t get to know much about him. He only has some specific interesting moments when he is used by Harold Pinter as a mouthpiece of his thoughts. An example of this can be found at page 412:

“Devlin: God? God? You think God is sinking into a quicksand? (...) Be careful how you talk about God. He’s the only God we have. If you let him go he won’t come back. (...) If you turn away from God it means that the great and noble game of soccer will fall into permanent oblivion. (...) Absence. Stalemate. Paralysis. A world without a winner.”

However, in this case, we may think this is a proof of Harold Pinter’s irony. The other character, Rebecca, is more than a mouthpiece. She has an story which is, in some way, the plot of the play. She is a woman which is all the time remembering her past, not paying much attention to what is happening in the present and stuck at her past love, not caring so much about her present boyfriend as she did with the previous one.

The plot is the remembering of the past of Rebecca, who is in couple with a guy is completely unsecure of the relationship they hold. The play has got plenty of flashbacks, and they will let us know what the author wants to transmit us, the real plot that is behind the present situation of the couple, when she was in love with her previous boyfriend who left her and when her baby was taken away from her.

The place is a room with nothing of interest because it does not interact with the plot nor with the characters, but the time is slightly stressed with the change of light, from sunlight to the light of the lamp, which can mean the passing from wake life to memories, because it’s at night when the plot most focuses on the memories of Rebecca.

I would like to stress two images displayed in words by Harold Pinter along the play: the first of them is the passage when she remembers that day in Dorset, when guides were taking people “across the cliff and down to the sea”, an image which reminds us of the lemmings’ behaviour. The other one is when Rebecca is talking about a woman carrying a baby at the street, a woman she was watching through the window, and at the next line she talks making us understand that the woman was, indeed, herself:

“Rebecca: (...) She listened to the baby’s heartbeat. The baby’s heart was beating.

The light in the room has darkened. The lamps are very bright.

Rebecca sits very still.

The baby was breathing.

Pause.

I held her to me. She was breathing. Her heart was beating.”(427-428)