One for the Road (Harold Pinter play)

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One for the Road is a play written by Harold Pinter. It is one of his overtly- political plays and was published in 1984. It is a violent play, not through actions dramatized on stage but through the allusions to violence that occurs off stage and that is continually implied.

The protagonist Victor, who has obviously been tortured, is being kept prisoner by a totalitarian regime and its willing officer Nicolas. The play does not discuss the violence substantively; Pinter implies it through the confined space and the non-verbal cues. Nicolas, though outwardly in control, is not the final arbiter of power. He refers to outside sources to validate his doings ("I am not alone"; "God speaks through me."). Nicolas, Pinter reveals, is at his core a very anxious character.

Nicolas also confronts Victor's wife, Gila, and he appears to be directing sexual torture of her that has taken and will continue to take place off stage ("How many times have you been raped"). Nicolas has an ostensibly-"innocent" chat with Victor's and Gila's son Nicky. Victor's and Gila's specific "offence" (if there is any, and that is doubtful) is not named. The play ends with suggestions of murder and impending terror in Nicolas's sentence to Victor: "Your son. I wouldn't worry about him. He was a little prick."

Pinter describes the terror in totalitarian states, but does not focus on it. Although, in the accompanying Grove Press edition interview "A Play and Its Politics" (by Nicholas Hern), Pinter describes "agitprop" as insulting to audiences (including himself), he acknowledges that he is doing "the same thing" in this play and that he deems it necessary. Written during Margaret Thatcher's time in office, One for the Road is an angry play about the West's negative influence in totalitarian states and the fact that torture may and does happen in Western countries too.

The Plays of Harold Pinter

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