Moonlight

Background"Memory plays" (19681982)From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Pinter wrote a series of plays and sketches that explorememoryand which critics sometimes classify as Pinter's "memory plays". These include Landscape , Silence Night, Old Times , No Man's Land ,The Proust Screenplay , Betrayal , Family Voices , Victoria Station , and A Kind of Alaska. Some of Pinter's later plays, including Party Time , Moonlight , Ashes to Ashes , and Celebration draw upon some features of his "memory" dramaturgy in their focus on the past in the present, but they have personal and political resonances and other tonal differences from these earlier memory plays.Moonlight is the first full length play Pinter has produced since 1978. Pinter said that the first notes he made for the play that was to become Moonlight date back to 1977. These notes were made on a number of yellow pads that Pinter kept despite the fact that for 26 years he didnt understand what the notes were to become.Moonlight emerged as a play in Pinters imagination during a revival production of his play No Mans Land in which Pinter played the part of Hirst. There was one particular speech delivered by Hirst about death and remembering those who are now gone that struck him in a new way. It was from this experience that Moonlight was created. Antonia Fraser confirms that the play has its origins in Pinters own experience. During rehearsals for No Mans Land Pinter had received a message that his mother was dying. She says that Because of the pressure of events, Harold never had time to mourn his mother fully and Moonlight is, in part, an expression of that.The play was first performed at a small theatre in Islington, a neighborhood in London, called the Almeida, in September of 1993. It transferred to the Comedy Theatre, near the Haymarket soon after. Pinter received rare reviews for both productions. John Lahr, the theatre critic for The New Yorker magazine described Moonlight as big, brave play, as dramatically compact and as emotionally searing as anything Pinter has written. Critics in London were in almost universal agreement; Pinter had created another masterpiece.Harold Pinter choose to delay the American premiere of Moonlight so that it could be the inaugural play in the Laura Pels Theatre at the Roundabout.

Plot Andy, a senior civil servant has tried (and failed) to run his home. Now on his deathbed, attended by his long-suffering wife, he looks back with a comic resentment, looks forward with a fear. They are trying to reach a final understanding as they look back over their unconventional and fiery marriage, but after years of Andy's ranting and Bel's stoic irony an accommodation is not going to be easy. Known as a tragicomedy of family dysfunction, the play opens as Andy lies on his deathbed, looking over his life, his youth, loves, lusts and betrayals of his wife. His absent sons - scarred by their incompetent, dictatorial father - refuse to return home. They are in another bedroom, somewhere in the same space, and they intellectually and conspiratorially speak of their relationship with their father. They mock Andys social and professional pretensions by playing out comic fantasies of Andy's life. Side-stepping their estrangement from him, they rationalize their love-hate relationship with him and defend the distance they are incapable of closing, even when their mother calls them home. In contrast to these closed sons, is the man's daughter, who refuses the dourness and bridges the space between the light and dark, youth and age, and death and life. Lovers from the past and a lost daughter round out this fine drama full of acid comedy and heart-wrenching despair.If there is an inherent difficulty with this play it lies in the portrayal of the characters of Andys sons, Fred and Jake. Rather than simply recalling the past the two brothers exorcise the pains of childhood by acting out various fictional scenes from Andy's life - impersonating, sometimes simultaneously, different aspects of their father's character illustrating his shortcomings, mocking his morals and pretensions.As soon as we are introduced to Jake and Fred we are initiated into their comically bitter world. The two boys invent a story in which Andy announces that he is to bestow on the new-born Jake a huge legacy, a legacy which is non-existent because he has just squandered it in a casino. The story is indicative of the brothers' attitude toward their father - as a parent he has no credit, he is utterly bankrupt.Fred, like Andy, is confined to bed (perhaps he has had a nervous breakdown). Jake visits him trying to "keep his pecker up" but as the play progresses we realize the little games they act out between themselves are becoming more bitter, darker and self-referential and that the boys' fears echo those of their hated father on that death-bed faraway.Three additional characters make an appearance. Ralph and Maria are a couple who have had a very close relationship with the family. They are introduced to us as comic creations but in a later scene they take on a more sinister aspect. Do Ralph and Maria really visit? Are they recalled as part of a family memory? Are they a dream? One thing is for sure, like everybody in this play, Ralph and Maria subvert and contradict what the other characters have told us. As Bel tries to arrange a final reconciliation, the figure of Bridget, the lost daughter/sister, hovers over the action. In flashback we see Bridget and her brothers as they were in earlier days. Characters: Andy a man in his 50s. Andy has spent his life working as a civil servant of some sort. We get the impression that Andy was not a warm father or husband. He may have loved his children, but they did not feel loved. He may have loved his wife Bel, but she didnt feel loved either. He is in his bed the entire play, chatting with Bel, exchanging hurtful reminders of painful historical events, infidelities, lost opportunities and unforgiving children. It seems that Andy is waiting to die. Bel a woman of 50. Bel was probably born into a social class higher than Andys. She is a calm woman, able to hurt Andy as deeply as he can hurt her. According to Andy, both he and Bel were unfaithful to each other with the same woman their friend Maria. Bel neither confirms nor denies. We see her greatest vulnerability when she calls her sons and asks them to come and see their sick father. Bridget a girl of 16. Bridget appears only as a ghostlike creature in the present. It is probable that she is dead and that her death caused a major schism in the family. We do not know the circumstances of her death, nor the nature of her position in the family. I have a feeling that Bridget is dead said Pinter to his director David Leveaux. Although in her first speech she talks of her parents in the present tense, it is a ghostly solicitude. Fred a man of 27. The younger son of Andy and Bel. Fred, just like his father, never gets out of his bed. It is possible that his spirit is quite ill, and that may account for his treating himself like an invalid. Jake the older brother, a man of 28. Jake lives with Fred. Although Jake is more physically active than Fred, he seems to be trapped in the apartment that makes up their world. Jake and Fred spent most of their time playing word games, weaving the stories of their boyhoods into strange fantastical fairytales. Many of the references they make to their father are sarcastic, leading us to believe that family life had been quite disappointing. Ralph a man in his 50s. Ralph was an old friend to Andy and Bel. A soccer coach, Ralph is down to earth and yet somewhat disconnected from the things that happen in his own life. He has observations about the world that seem quite sharp and at the same time irrelevant to what is actually happening. Maria a woman of 50s. Married to Ralph, Maria was a close friend of Andys and Bels many years ago. According to Andy, Maria had separate affairs with both Andy and Bel. It seems from Marias recollections that she was quite smitten with them both. Maria and Ralph come to visit Andy and Bel after many years of drifting apart. Marias memories include Bridget and the grandchildren Andy and Bel so sorely miss.

StructureUnlike many of Pinters earlier plays, Moonlight does not take place in an enclosed space. Nevertheless, the three spaces delineated on the stage still present the audience with location in which Pinters characters are trapped. The locations are placed very close together and yet they must be extremely far apart. The space occupied by Bridget is a ghostly place, bathed in moonlight, a place of memory and longing. It is a place that Bridget can never leave. The two sons are equally trapped in their small room. We are not sure why they cant or wont visit their parents, nor do we understand why they are unable to move forward with their lives. But it is clear that they are confined to the small place provided by their room. Perhaps the confinement of Andy and Bel is the most practical. We are given to understand that this old couple is waiting for an ending. It is also usual for a Pinter play to contain some element of a threat to a world otherwise calm and set in a certain order. In earlier Pinter plays this threat has taken the form of physical menace and / or psychological harm. At first glance it might be difficult to locate the threat faced by the characters in Moonlight. But after consideration, it is clear that the greatest threat is the threat of impending death. In his other plays Pinter has been able to structure the action so that the menace retreats in the end, leaving the characters much as they were at the beginning of the action. In Moonlight, Pinter has created a situation in which the menace is present from the start to the conclusion of the play. John Peter, theatre critic for the London Sunday Times, wrote that in Moonlight People are no longer seeking admittance, craving security or protecting their strongholds. This is a play about departure, about barely holding on, about letting go. This observation points to another difference between Moonlight and his previous plays. In the past Pinter characters have been all about fighting for control over their lives, their space, even reality when and where it is threatened.

Themes Moonlight represents both a homecoming and a major departure for Pinter. A homecoming in the sense that it picks up on many of the themes that have haunted him over the years: the subjectivity of memory, the idea of family life as a brutal battleground, the hunger for an ascertainable past. Death is the predominating theme. There is a tangible sense of mortality, comments Billington , a yearning for contact between the living and the dead.This separation (between the living and the dead) is also evident within marriage and between a father and his sons, argues the critic. Academic Mark Batty develops this idea, suggesting Moonlight stages the emotional gaps between members of a nuclear family, and the various manners in which the individual members of the family cope with those gaps.31 The accumulative effect of these various examples of separation creates what John Lahr described as the plays litany of loss.Moonlight deals partly with the ambivalence of sons towards fathers, but it is also about a fathers fear of estrangement from his sons. The play is also concerned with the pain of growing up in a dysfunctional family, the unreliability of memory and the fear inherent in facing death without the firm support of faith or the deep comfort of true love.

In Moonlight no one interrelates with anyone else, as they remain imprisoned by their individual obsessions. People exchange dialogue, but they talk at rather than to one another. Throughout his career Pinter explored different aspects of loneliness, using speech-rhythms that captured his characters' emotional inadequacies. Unable to express themselves, they resort instead to meaningless repetitions, punctuated by digressions into topics apparently unrelated to the subject under discussing. The irony of course is that such digressions constitute an integral part of the characters' discourse, prompting us to reflect on what they are not saying. Subtext - whether emotional or linguistic - is an important part of any Pinter work.

SymbolsLanguage and word games Andys solitude is especially emphasized by the scene in which Bel phones Jake and Fred, who pretend that they are a Chinese laundry. When the phone rings, Jake instantly answers Chinese laundry? as if this were a prepared defence-mechanism against a call he obviously expects. Their tactic is thrown slightly when Bel enters into their game and asks Do you do dry cleaning? They constantly shift the phone, and Jake expresses his remorse through anger Of course we do dry cleaning. What kind of fucking laundry are you if you dont do dry cleaning? It is a symbol of denial: two sons reject their father, their past, their bond.Pinter has a greater compassion for his sons, hopelessly playing fantasy games in which they imagine themselves cocooned in male solidarity, surrounded by elusive, substitute father figures. Moonlight - David Leveaux who directed the original production at the Almeida Theatre in 1993 suggested that the plays title reveals much of its meaning. Its a punning title. The thing about moonlight is that its the last light you see before total darkness. Its after the sun. Its a very brief, black, intense light which fades too. That tells us about the territory the play occupies which is that were between one stage and another.During a scene when Andy, stumbling in a search for whiskey, enters Bridgets territory and senses her presence in the moonlit background, his cry Ah darling captures the hunger of the living for the dead. Bridgets soliloquy describing a family invitation to a party and her own solitary arrival at a dark, deserted house bathed in moonlight is partly about Bridgets total separation from the parents, her sense of exile. It also describes moment of her death. It is a speech of dying alone.Light Andy becomes angry with the dying of the light. If, the past is a mist, then the future also offers an endless dark horizon. What comes as a conclusion out of Andys troubles is that life is as meaningless as death and our whole existence without point or purpose.