Ashes to Ashes (play)

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Ashes to Ashes is a 1996 play by British playwright Harold Pinter.

The one-act play opens with Devlin and Rebecca (possibly middle-aged) talking in what appears to be a home living room on an early summer evening. Though throughout the play it sometimes appears Devlin and Rebecca may be married, in fact their roles are unclear and shifting, and infused with menace. In fact, Devlin ultimately becomes at once Rebecca's husband or lover, her therapist, and her murderer. Indeed, initially their discussion seems more to be between a therapist (Devlin), and his neurotic patient than between two lovers or husband and wife. Devlin questions Rebecca in forceful ways, and she reveals personal information and dream-like sequences to him. In their first exchange, Rebecca tells of a man who appears to be sexually abusing her, and threatening to strangle her. Rebecca tells Devlin that she literally told the killer, "Put your hand round my throat"--an act that will be terrifyingly reversed later in the play. This exchange is followed immediately by Devlin asking "Do you feel you're being hypnotized?" "Who by?" asks Rebecca. "By me," answers Devlin. Such hypnotism would be a peculiar thing for a husband to be doing to his wife, though it could be done by a psychologist or psychiatrist.

During the rest of the talk, Rebecca relates several dream-like sequences, which blur the roles of her and Devlin, and introduce several eerie themes and characters. She first tells Devlin that the threatening man referred to in the opening of the play apparently worked as a "guide" for a travel agency. She goes on to ask, "Did I ever tell you about that place...about the time he [the threatening man] took me to that place?" This place turns out to be "a kind of factory" peopled by a strange group of passive workers who work for the threatening man, and who "respected his...purity, his...conviction." Adding to the mounting terror, she tells Devlin that "He used to go to the local railway station and walk down the platform and tear all the babies from the arms of their screaming mothers." This "atrocity" becomes a central theme and image of the play. Rebecca then says, "By the way, I'm terribly upset," because a police siren she had just heard has disappeared into the distance. Devlin replies that the police are always busy, and thus another siren will start up at any time and "you can take comfort in that at least. Can't you? You'll never be lonely again. You'll never be without a police siren. I promise you."--as if to say that he can "promise" her comfort in the chaos of existence. Rebecca hates the siren "fading away; I hate it echoing away." An echo will appear at the end of the play, again with terrifying overtones.

Soon, in a famous sequence, Rebecca tells Devlin that she had been writing a note, and that when she put the pen she was using down, it rolled off the table. The following bizarre exchange takes place:

REBECCA: It rolled right off, onto the carpet. In front of my eyes.
DEVLIN: Good God.
REBECCA: This pen, this perfectly innocent pen.
DEVLIN: You can't know it was innocent.
REBECCA: Why not?
DEVLIN: Because you don't know where it had been. You don't know how many other hands have held it, how many other hands have written with it, what other people have been doing with it. You know nothing of its history. You know nothing of its parents' history.
REBECCA: A pen has no parents.

In another dream sequence Rebecca describes herself looking out the window of a summer house and seeing a crowd of people being led by "guides" toward the ocean, which they disappear into like lemmings. Then while discussing a peculiar condition known as "mental elephantiasis," in which "when you spill an ounce of gravy, for example, it immediately expands and becomes a vast sea of gravy," Rebecca says that "You are not the victim [of such an event], you are the cause of it." She then adds, "Because it was you who spilt the gravy in the first place, it was you who handed over the bundle." This "bundle" and its tragic contents will appear at the end of the play.

After a brief aside about what appear to be ordinary family matters (Rebecca's sister, her children, and her estranged husband), Rebecca tells Devlin "I don't think we can start again. We started...a long time ago. We started. We can't start again. We can end again." "But we've never ended," answers Devlin, to which Rebecca responds, "Oh, we have. Again and again and again. And we can end again. And again and again. And again." This and several other things Rebecca says during the play evince a strong hostility toward Devlin. Devlin then asks why Rebecca has never told him about "this lover of yours," but Rebecca veers into another dream sequence, where she is standing atop a building, and sees a man, a boy, and a woman with a child in her arms in a snowy street below. In a breathtaking but very simple turn in the text, the baby is suddenly transformed into Rebecca's arms, and she listens to its heart beating. Devlin then approaches Rebecca, and begins to enact the strangulation scene described by Rebecca at the beginning of the play--with one key difference. This time she does not ask him to put his hands around her throat, and instead Devlin says "Ask me to put my hand round your throat," which she does not reply to.

In the play's brilliant conclusion, during which everything Rebecca says is eerily echoed, she tells a story of her walking onto a train platform with a baby "in a bundle." The scene has a strong feeling of the Holocaust, and she says that "They took us to the trains" and "They were taking the babies away." Finally, Rebecca is forced to give her baby in the bundle to one of the men, and she gets on the train and "we arrived at this place" (recall that earlier Rebecca asked Devlin of the threatening man, "Did I ever tell you about that place...about the time he took me to that place"? [Italics added]). A woman asks where her baby is, and in the final haunting lines, Rebecca says:

REBECCA: And I said what baby
ECHO: what baby
REBECCA: I don't have a baby
ECHO: a baby
REBECCA: I don't know of any baby
ECHO: of any baby
Pause.
REBECCA: I don't know of any baby
Long silence.
BLACKOUT

[edit] Production History

The play was first produced in London by the Royal Court Theatre at the Ambassadors Theatre in September of 1996. Stephen Rea played Devlin, Lindsay Duncan played Rebecca, and Pinter directed.