A Slight Ache
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'A Slight Ache' is a very complex play by Harold Pinter about an English couple (Edward and Flora). Edward fears a force from the outerworld interacting with his comfortable routine (a major theme in Pinter), reflected in the slight ache he feels constantly. A matchseller stands at his back gate - he has been standing there for a long time.
Edward invites the matchseller into his study, where he confronts him about why he is standing there. Throughout the play, the matchseller does not appear to respond. Edward pours his soul out, revealing his fears. Eventually, he self-destructs as Flora adopts the matchseller: "I'm going to put you to bed! I'm going to put you to bed and take care of you." Gradually, the matchseller beings to take Edward's place, and in the final dramatic moments of the piece, Edward's role becomes completley usurped and redundant.
Main themes: dreams and desires, superiority and inferiority, the unknown, fears, growing up (the slight ache could be considered to be merely psychological, representing Edward's fears, or alternatively as a sign of physical ageing: the matchseller, after all, has a glass eye, according to Edward, and it is the matchseller who will ultimately take Edward's place)
Flora's husband sees himself as a 'man's man': master of his house, knows nothing about flowers and stuff. Outside, a silent match-seller. Is he a threat? What does he want? The play is about fear and how you deceive yourself by trying to disarm the enemy: social reality is made sinister by an eerie sense of symbolism. "The Sunday Times 'Culture' April 9 2006"
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| The Plays of Harold Pinter |
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| Plays : Ashes to Ashes, The Basement, Betrayal, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, Celebration, The Collection, The Dumb Waiter, The Dwarfs, Family Voices, The Homecoming, The Hothouse, A Kind of Alaska, Landscape, The Lover, Moonlight, Monologue, Mountain Language, A Night Out, Night School, No Man's Land, Old Times, One for the Road, Party Time, Remembrance of Things Past (with Di Trevis), The Room, Silence, A Slight Ache, Tea Party, Victoria Station, Voices (with James Clarke) Sketches : Apart from That, Applicant, The Black and White, Dialogue for Three, Interview, Last to Go, The New World Order, Night, Precisely, Press Conference, Request Stop, Special Offer, That's All, That's Your Trouble, Trouble in the Works |
