One For The Road (Harold Pinter Play) - Synopsis

Synopsis

Victor and his wife Gila, who have obviously been tortured, as their "clothes" are "torn" and they are "bruised" (31, 61), and their seven-year old son, Nicky, are imprisoned in separate rooms of a house by a totalitarian regime represented by an officer named Nicolas. Though in control locally—"I can do absoluely anything I like" (33)—he is not the final arbiter of power, since he refers to outside sources to validate his actions: "Do you know the man who runs this country?" (47); "God speaks through me" (36, 40). But the play reveals that Nicolas is insecure and that he overcompensates by aggressive gestures and words, threatening both Victor and Gila with a peculiar gesture, waving and jabbing his "big finger" and his "little finger both at the same time" before their eyes (33, 71); while he tries to converse with Victor as if they were both "civilised" men, he stresses gratuitously that "Everyone respects me here" (36) and invents depraved fantasies of having sex with a menstruating Gila (46–47), even ruminating perversely that she has "fallen in love" with him (48–50). Pinter highlighted Nicolas' insecurities in his own performance of the role as directed by Robin Lefèvre in 2001, adding stage business at the start; as Michael Billington describes in his review of a performance at the New Ambassadors Theatre, "In a long, silent prelude we see Nicolas psyching himself up for the ensuing ritual."

When Nicolas confronts Gila, he refers to sexual torture of her that has taken and will continue to take place off stage: "Have they been raping you? How many times? How many times have you been raped? Pause. How many times?" How many times have you been raped? (70–71).

Though Nicolas chats in an ostensibly-innocuous manner with Victor's and Gila's seven-year-old son Nicky about whether the child "Would like to be a soldier" when he grows up (58), he bullies even the little boy: "You like soldiers. Good. But you spat at my soldiers and you kicked them. You attacked them." (58). After Nicky says, "I didn't like those soldiers", Nicolas replies menacingly: "They don't like you either, my darling" (59).

Victor's and Gila's specific "offences" (if there are any) go unnamed. Nicolas accuses Gila of mentioning her father when she responds to a question about where she met her husband by saying that she met him in "a room", in her "father's room"; Nicolas exaggerates this mere mention as if she were "to defame, to debase, the memory of father"—"a wonderful man a man of honour" whom he claims to have "loved as if he were my own father" (66).

In his final exchange with Victor, Nicolas' use of the past tense signifies that the soldiers have killed Nicky and portends his parents' similarly terrifying fate at their hands: "Your son. I wouldn't worry about him. He was a little prick" (79; italics added), leading to Pinter's final stage directions, as Victor "straightens and stares at" Nicolas, followed by "Silence" and "Blackout" (80).