The Room

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For other uses, see The Room (disambiguation).
The Room
Written by Harold Pinter
Characters Bert Hudd
Rose
Mr Kidd
Mr Sands
Mrs Sands
Riley
Date of premiere May 1957
Original language English
Setting A room in a large house
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The Room is the title of the first play written by Harold Pinter. The play has strong similarities to Pinter's second play, The Birthday Party. Both take place in run-down buildings claiming to be a "boarding house" which become the scene of a visitation by apparent strangers.

In The Room, after one of the two main characters, Rose Hudd, is visited by a young couple, Mr. and Mrs. Sands, who are looking for a flat, a blind black man, named Riley, who has purportedly been waiting in the basement, suddenly arrives upstairs to Rose's room, to deliver a mysterious message to Rose. The play ends in violence after Rose's husband, Bert, returns.

The Room is invested with many of the elements that later became elements of Pinter's work including the familiarity of dialogue that is disturbing, the subtle characterization of characters with whom the audience learns nearly nothing, and a mood that can be funny, moving, and menacing simultaneously.

Pinter wrote The Room over several days in 1957 at the suggestion of his friend Henry Woolf for his production as part of a postgraduate program in directing at the University of Bristol, Bristol, England. In 2007 the British Library/Sheffield University Theatre Archive project began to interview surviving members of the cast, as well as the author of the accompanying one-acter 'The Rehearsal'. Also in May 2007, students at Bristol University mounted a production in the original performance space that was recorded by the British Library Sound Archive. An image of the original programme was posted in the British Library's Harold Pinter blog.

[edit] Production history

The Room was first produced by Henry Woolf and presented at The Drama Studio at the University of Bristol in May 1957 and again as part of the National Student Drama Festival held at the University of Bristol in 1958. It was at this second performance that the play was first reviewed by the London Sunday Times by drama critic Harold Hobson who helped to found the Drama Festival with some of his colleagues. The original production featured the following cast:

The play was presented later at the Hampstead Theatre Club on January 21, 1960 as part of a double bill with The Dumb Waiter. It was directed by Harold Pinter and featured the following cast:

The double bill was transferred on March 8, 1960 to the Royal Court Theatre where it was directed by Anthony Page with the following cast:

[edit] See also

v • d • e
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
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