63 LITERATURE
Dilek Inan 
Balikesir University, Turkey
From Room to Tomb: Moonlight 
Summary
In 1993, a decade of directly political plays was followed by Moonlight, which in the Guardian’s 
words would “come as a shock to those who have lately pigeonholed Harold Pinter as a writer 
of bruising polemic” (Billington 1993, 1). Although Moonlight made history as Pinter’s  rst full 
length work for the theatre since Betrayal, it should rather be seen as an interval from politics 
where the playwright re-explores the interior landscapes of his early work, where he returns to the 
pastoral as a landscape of retreat and fantasy. Indeed, the play’s title suggests a pastoral realm.  e 
heroine retreats into Nature through linguistic idealisation. Moonlight can best be comprehended 
as Pinter brie<y leaving politics to explore new horizons – “his own private griefs and anguish in 
the most nakedly and unashamedly emotional of all his plays” (Billington 1996, 338).  is paper 
evaluates Moonlight as a reworking of Pinter’s own roots thematically, stylistically and spatially.
Key words: Harold Pinter, Moonlight, space, room, tomb, death, separation 
Od sobe do grobnice: Mesečina
Povzetek
Leta 1993 je desetletju odkrito političnih iger sledila Mesečina (Moonlight), ki je bila v Guardianu 
opisana kot »šok za tiste, ki so Harolda Pinterja v zadnjem času opisovali kot pisca neizprosnih 
polemik« (Billington 1993, 1). Čeprav je Mesečina postala znana kot prva celovečerna drama po 
Prevari (Betrayal), bi jo bilo namesto tega primerneje videti kot umik od politike, med katerim 
dramatik ponovno raziskuje notranjost svojih zgodnjih del in se v njem vrne k pastoralu kot 
pokrajini umika in fantazije. Že naslov drame navaja na pastoralno okolje. Junakinja se v Naravo 
umakne s pomočjo lingvističnega idealiziranja. Mesečino je mogoče najlažje razumeti kot Pinterjev 
kratkotrajen umik iz politike, namenjen raziskovanju novih obzorij – »njegove intimne bolečine 
in trpljenja v najbolj odkrito in brezsramno čustveni izmed vseh njegovih iger« (Billington 1996, 
338). Prispevek ovrednoti Mesečino kot tematsko, slogovno in prostorsko ponovno obravnavo 
Pinterjevih lastnih korenin.
Ključne besede: Harold Pinter, Mesečina, prostor, soba, grobnica, smrt, ločitev
UDK 821.111–252.09Pinter H.
DOI: 10.4312/elope.9.1.63-75
64 Dilek Inan From Room to Tomb: Moonlight 
From Room to Tomb: Moonlight 
1. Introduction
Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter has presented himself in Britain in the role of a 
writer who engages very publicly in discussion on international a=airs. After 1970, he became 
engaged in cultural and millennial crises: he stopped being a man of leisure and became an 
activist, a  ghter and an investigator. Just after he wrote his  rst major openly political play, 
One for the Road, he said that he did not know what he was going to write next. He told Bryan 
Appleyard that he felt “there will be no writing, no entertainment /.../ in a very short time unless 
we recognise the realities of the world in which we live” (Appleyard 1984, 13).  erefore, his 
plays and  lm scripts at the time focused on the at rocities in the world
1
 and showed that no easy 
optimism was possible. He suggested a revolutionist strain and resisted the instrumentalism and 
abstraction exercised by governments. 
For almost half a century, critics have been puzzled by Pinter’s Pinteresque language. Although 
Moonlight was greeted as a historically positive event – Pinter’s  rst full-length play since Betrayal 
– most critics seem unable to accept the play on its own terms, “preferring to see it as a self-parody, 
and its author as trapped inside the Pinteresque” (Ghilardi-Santacatterina 1997, 114). According 
to Benedict Nightingale, “For all its oddities and obscurities, Moonlight marks a genuine return 
to form” (Nightingale 1993, 3). Nicolas De Jongh was one of the critics who missed the play’s 
point; he believed Moonlight was simply a “laboured imitation of his old great self” (De Jongh 
1993). Similarly, Martin Hoyle reminded his readers of Pinter’s writer’s block, arguing that here 
was “a blocked talent going through the motions producing a collection of Pinterisms: evasive 
gentility, shock four-letter words, mysterious codi ed exchanges” (Hoyle 1993).  e list carries 
on, as Claire Armistead wrote: “At 62 Pinter is coming back into his own and confounding 
the theatrical obituarists who have for years been mourning his passing as a playwright able, or 
inclined to write at any length” (Armistead 1993, 3). And Michael Coveney regarded the play 
as having “the potent evanescence of his earlier disjointed reveries, Landscape and Silence (1969), 
and the purgatorial, between life-and-death bedroom bleakness of A Kind of Alaska (1973)” 
(Coveney 1993, 49).
 ere is a shadow of truth here, but we should inste ad read Moonlight as an extremely serious and 
sophisticated recycling of themes and images. Critics are right to stress the echoes from previous 
plays. His earlier work becomes a major theme in Moonlight as his earlier characters and milieu 
reappear: “the sculptured iciness of No Man’s Land, the cockney swagger of #e Homecoming, the 
ribaldry of #e Caretaker” (Grant 1993, 13). Moonlight represents a dialectic between spirituality 
and materialism. It is a homecoming in that he re-explores the poetics of terror, the subjectivity 
of memory, the unknowability of one’s partner, the need for a tangible past and the idea of family 
life as a brutal battleground. Moonlight systematises and combines the theme of the family (from 
the early plays) with the theme of death (from the political plays). 
1
 Precisely (1983) presented an apocalyptic picture of the world, and Handmaid’s Tale (1990) suggested a futuristic dystopia in North 
America.
65 LITERATURE
In his 1993 play Moonlight, Pinter revisits the idea of becoming family exiles, a theme he had 
already explored in Family Voices.  us, Moonlight returns to a more personal family setting where 
there are three separate playing areas on stage, and as in Silence, the characters’ narrations weave 
themselves in and out of the others’ past and present lives. Pinter said that “most of the areas one 
writes about are  nally pretty mysterious to the wr iter. If they’re not, there’s no discovery, there’s 
no path, no journey at all” (Pinter, 1999). He has used mystery and image as a source of revelation 
and meaning. Moonlight comes as a new journey where he discovers death as a new horizon.  e 
play introduces a new note, which Pinter has explored joyously. Following the political plays’ 
con<ict and anger, Moonlight is instead an interval of light, hope and regeneration. 
Pinter’s earliest major work, #e Dwarfs, which he wrote in 1950, established moonlight as one 
of his basic preoccupations: 
Isn’t that the moon up there? It must be late, Len said. Can you see the lights there, on the 
roads? All that.  ey’re bells.  ey have that sound. I can see the moon where I stand. It’s all 
right.  e globe’s turning.  is is not night.  is isn’t night. Can you hear the moon? Eh? 
And these lights?  ere’s a bell here. We’re making this bell. We’re making the light. Can 
you hear the moon, through the sound? It is in us (Pinter 1990, 115).
2. Human Landscape Between Death and Separation
In Moonlight Pinter explores the spiritual conquering of physical space and the relationship 
between physical and spiritual space.  us, the play starts in the territory where Party Time 
ended: in a ghostly moonlit space. Like Jimmy in Party Time, the heroine in Moonlight is trapped 
in a dark spiritual space whose existence is only possible through human mortality. Pinter’s earlier 
characters fought for rooms to satisfy their primitive need to be protected. Rooms, as safe as 
wombs, have protected his people from external menace. Alternately, Moonlight articulates death 
as a new horizon where the characters  nd themselve s in tombs instead of rooms. On the other 
hand, womb and tomb are compatible terms here: Andy yearns to return to the womb, to seek 
death, which is the  nal stasis.  e correlation bet ween womb and tomb is clear in Bel’s claim 
that babies know more about death than adults do:
We’ve forgotten death but they haven’t forgotten it.  ey remember it. Because some of 
them, those who are really very young, remember the moment before their life began – it’s 
not such a long time ago for them, you see – and the moment before their life began they 
were of course dead. (Pinter 1998, 358). 
 is yearning for death was central for Pete in #e Dwarfs. In a sense the later plays restore a 
philosophical breadth and intellectual overtones that Pinter partly conceded since that early novel:
I’m of a mind to abdicate. […] Because I’m the axiom I will not escape. In the act of proof, 
after all, is the proof.  e gaschamber, I won’t den y it, is a ripe and purposive unit. I look 
into my garden and see walking blasphemies. A blasphemy is a terrible thing.  ey cut the 
throat of a child over the body of a naked woman.   e blood runs down her back, the blood 
runs between the cheeks of her arse. In my sight the world commits sacrilege. I shall walk to 
66 Dilek Inan From Room to Tomb: Moonlight 
my own co@n, when I have chosen to make time. Soon I shall place a tombstone upon that 
world. […]  e world is vanity.  e world is impertin ent. (Pinter 1990, 111-2).
 e world of Pinter’s plays has been one of vanity a nd impertinence. In Moonlight, as Pinter 
promises through Pete, he places a tombstone on the world of atrocities that he presented in his 
political plays and retreats into more private landscapes to explore human isolation and su=ering 
through death’s barrenness. Here the absent/dead daughter Bridget exists in a spiritual location, 
which may be her tomb. She hovers over the mortal worlds of her parents and brothers: her 
father Andy is on his deathbed, and her brother Fred is con ned to his bed with a mortal disease. 
Pinter explains the play’s central idea to Gussow, as “a very simple question of an image of a man 
in bed, dying, and his wife was in the room. I knew he was a man of considerable vigour, and 
I am pretty sure that the line ‘Where are they?’ was central to the whole” (Gussow 1993, 98). 
 e play depicts the themes of dying and separation in complex ways, including their presence 
within marriage, and between a father and his sons. 
Moonlight explores the relationship between physical proximity and emotional distance. It 
involves three separate playing areas: Andy’s bedroom, Fred’s bedroom and Bridget’s intangible 
space.  e mode of the setting is reminiscent of the memory plays of the late 1960s and 1970s 
where characters are also physically close yet emotionally remote, and speci cally the play recalls 
Silence in its articulation of three separated playing areas disengaged from each other.  e action 
is formulated by fragmentary juxtapositions of each separate area – one space interrupting the 
other. It is important that, while space in Pinter’s political work refers to a de nable, global 
socio-historical world, in Moonlight he suggests that it is not geography but emotional reality 
that determines human landscape. 
 e play portrays a kind of wasteland of human isola tion and su=ering. It starts and  nishes 
with Bridget in faint light talking lyrically about light, darkness and the moon. Her location is 
not speci ed; she appears in an area and is moving about in the night. Since there is no moon, 
she is sleepless in her tomb. Her task is to ensure that her parents “sleep in peace and wake up 
rested. […] Because I know that when they look at me they see that I am all they have left of 
their life” (Pinter 1998, 319). She is the only character who can commute between mortality and 
the eternal; thus, she can build a blurred bridge between solitude and association, youth and age.
 e play oscillates between corporeal and incorporea l landscapes. Bridget watches the tangible in 
her ghostly moonlit space. Her unlimited indistinct space is succeeded by her parents’ bedroom, 
where her father, Andy, is on his deathbed. He is in his  fties and accompanied by his wife, Bel, at 
this alarming moment. Bel’s failure to  nd their tw o sons makes her a target for Andy’s mockery 
and bad jokes. But there is a relationship here that tames the humour and makes it indicate a 
bond, and a shared history, rather than just – as in so many of the earlier plays – aggression. Andy 
and Bel make fun of each other.  eir teasing create s genuinely amusing dialogues, and Bel’s 
feelings for her apparently ill husband are expressed as a mockery of concern: 
Do you feel anything? What do you feel? Do you feel hot? Or cold? Or both? What do you 
feel? Do you feel cold in your legs? Or hot? What about your  ngers? What are they? Are 
they cold? Or hot? Or neither cold nor hot? (Pinter 1998, 321) 
67 LITERATURE
Such exchanges illustrate a resistance to the conventional sentimentality of death. Andy himself 
displaces the sentimental as he watches Bel embroidering: “Oh. I’ve been meaning to ask you. 
What are you making there? A winding sheet? Are you going to wrap me up in it when I conk 
out? You’d better get a move on. I’m going fast” (Pinter 1998, 324). When Andy complains 
that his own wife is taking the piss out of him, she claims that, because of her convent school 
education, the term leaves her mysti ed, and Andy c ontrasts her convent school pretensions 
with the suggestion that she has always been over-sexed: “You’ve never been nonplussed in the 
whole of your voracious, lascivious, libidinous life” (Pinter 1998, 321). He pedantically explains 
the term taking the piss as mockery, that it means to mock; however, Bel demands a rational 
explanation, and Andy replies, “Rationality went down the drain donkey’s years ago” (Pinter 
1998, 320). Logical explanations have gone out of use and have been absent for a long time. 
Logic/rationality has no place in today’s world and her logical mind is isolated now – “swimming 
about in waste disposal turdology” (Pinter 1998, 320). Such comic routines keep Andy alive. As 
John Lahr puts it, “Mockery is their oxygen and their substitute for passion” (Lahr 1993, 110). 
Directing #e Homecoming, Peter Hall said, “ e phrase always on our lips wh en we were doing 
this play was ‘taking the piss’. It’s a cockney phrase meaning getting the better of your opponent 
by mockery” (Hall 1971, 14). Similarly, Peter Hall said, “a good deal of Harold’s tone has to do 
with that very veiled kind of mockery” (Hall 1971, 14). Now, however, this language denotes a 
struggle for life as well as the old urge to conquer. 
Ironically, Andy could have been a character in the political plays: he is a civil servant; his life 
was built on order: “I was admired and respected. I do not say I was loved. Love is an attribute 
no civil servant worth his salt would give house room to” (Pinter 1998, 210). He is a loudmouth 
who never swears in the o@ce but keeps his obscene language for the home – personal excesses 
remain in the private sphere. In his room, he talks to Bel about his exemplary existence at work 
and how he has inspired the young men and women, “to put their shoulders to the wheel and 
their noses to the grindstone and to keep faith at all costs with the structure which after all 
ensured the ordered government of all our lives, which took perfect care of us, which held us to 
its bosom, as it were” (Pinter 1998, 333). 
Andy yearns for Bridget. He wants to see his imaginary grandchildren to give them his blessing. 
Bel sits frozen as Andy talks of his poor grandchildren, about “to lose their granddad […] when 
the door was about to open on new ever-widening and ever-lengthening horizons” (Pinter 1998, 
327). Bel tries to comfort him with the thought that death is his new horizon, but Andy plays 
anxiously with her image: will he cross the horizon as he dies or after he is dead, or will he 
perhaps stay stuck in the middle of it? He pictures the weather in the horizon, “If it’s pitch black 
for ever what would have been the point of going through all these enervating charades in the 
 rst place?” (Pinter 1998, 358). He hopes there is a loophole through which he would crawl and 
meet himself coming back: Like screaming on the brink of death, Pinter’s people have nothing 
to cling to but words, their ambiguities and associations. 
Andy holds on to memory strongly. At the same time it is a play “about departure, about barely 
holding on, about letting go” (Peter 1993, 15). Pinter claims that Andy “seems to deny the 
existence of more or less anybody else. He says at one point, ‘Nothing ever happened’. He denies 
68 Dilek Inan From Room to Tomb: Moonlight 
the existence of his own life, except he’s so contradictory that he’s also asserting it all the time” 
(Gussow 1993, 107). Like Max in #e Homecoming, Andy is in discord with his sons and sees 
them as “lazy idle layabouts, a sponging parasitical pair of ponces. Sucking the tit of the state” 
(Pinter 1998, 349). Pinter veri ed that Max and And y “have a language in common, a mode 
of using language” (Gussow 1993, 107). Jake and Fred, the estranged sons, appear in Fred’s 
bedroom.  ey also communicate through bizarrely ela borate jokes, but unlike their parents 
they never quite take issues seriously. Most of their exchanges consist of word-games that come 
about as a result of what the other has previously said; their conversations have their own logic 
but often are circular or impotent. Jake is in the position of the big brother keeping his little 
brother’s spirits up. He is a born artist/poet described by Fred as – like John Lewis’s department 
store – never knowingly undersold.
Fred, on the other hand, withdraws himself into a melancholic world and stays in bed through 
much of the play, as though they have inherited two sides of their dying father’s existence. He 
tells Jake that he is much happier in bed: “I’d be very unhappy to get out of bed and go out and 
meet strangers and all that kind of thing” (Pinter 1998, 364). He is out of work and bedridden 
like Aston in #e Caretaker and Len in #e Dwarfs:
 ere’s a dryrot in me. […] I could stay in this arm chair for ever. Or in bed. Yes. Do you 
know, I can’t step out of bed? I’m unable to step out of the bed. I can’t put my foot on the 
<oor. I could stay there, always. […] A sack of old bones. […] I can’t even commit suicide. 
It’s got to be a decision.  at’s an action. I can’t act. (Pinter 1990, 71-2). 
Fred feels he has been left in darkness and that his “equilibrium is in tatters” (Pinter 1998, 364). 
Pinter explains Fred’s position as a kind of nervous breakdown, which is “a common condition 
for a lot of young men; perhaps even more young men than women” (Gussow 1993, 99-100). 
In this household only Jake can adapt to society. He talks about scienti c light meters, which can 
 nd and locate the light in the dark and “place it in a little box.  ey wrap it up and tie a ribbon 
round it and you get it tax free, as a reward for all your labour and faith and all the concern 
and care for others you have demonstrated so eloquently for so long” (Pinter 1998, 365).  is 
symbolic light will serve Fred as his own personal light eternal. Jake imagines a messianic role 
through which he saves society. Pinter’s focus in Moonlight is to mock the traditional mockery, 
the dominant social attitudes, which Pinter has been dramatising in his political plays and 
particularly in Party Time. Indeed, there are autobiographical elements here; Jake mocks the very 
same society that has rewarded Pinter’s labour and faith and all the concern and care for others, 
– which he has demonstrated so eloquently for so long – with such hostile criticism. However, 
Pinter’s artistic output was to be crowned by the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.  
 e exchanges between Fred and Jake are also a mocke ry of Andy’s businesslike manner of 
organising his personal life, which refers to the whole system of bureaucracy (that Pinter  has 
explored in #e Trial). Talking about his father, Jake makes fun of patriarchy: “He was not in it 
for pleasure or glory. Let me make that quite clear. Applause came not his way. Nor did he seek 
it. Gratitude came not his way. Nor did he seek it. Masturbation came not his way. Nor did he 
seek it. I’m sorry – I meant approbation came not his way” (Pinter 1998, 327).
69 LITERATURE
Jake describes his confusion of the words masturbation/approbation as a lapse in concentration, 
a slip, perhaps a Freudian slip. 
According to Jake, his father adhered strictly to the rule of law. Althusser conceptualises the 
father in Lacanian terms: the father in its symbolic (rather than biological) dimension as the 
most powerful signi er “of the Law, the fantasy ima ge of all Right” (Althusser 1971, 212). For 
Lacan and Althusser, the Father, “who is Law [...] represents the Order of the human signi er 
[...] the Law of Culture, [the] discourse of the Other” (Althusser 1971, 212). Pinter o=ers his 
own comic rewriting of Lacanian and Althusserian analysis: Andy’s rule of law links with the rule 
of his penis/phallic order.  e rule of law is equal to the rule of thumb, which may also have 
an anatomical reference as the thumb is not far from the penis: “Not as the crow <ies” (Pinter 
1998, 328). Fred and Jake have estranged themselves from their father because of his anatomical/
symbolic power.
Fred’s bedroom becomes literally a playing area (as the stage direction emphasises – ‘THREE 
MAIN PLAYING AREAS’) where the overgrown boys constantly play name games: 
JAKE What did you say your name was? I’ve made a note of it somewhere.
FRED Macpherson.
JAKE  at’s funny. I thought it was Gonzales.
   […] 
FRED Yours was the name they gave me.
JAKE What name was that?
FRED Saunders (Pinter 1998, 338-9).
 is game resembles some long-past military-unit scenario; these names could refer to unseen 
people in the play or to anyone, or they could be nonsensical. As Katherine H. Burkman suggests, 
“All in this play are strangers, yet all  nally are the same, bear the same name” (Burkman 1994, 
55).  e name games are a metaphor, showing their st ruggle for identity and power. Similarly, 
Francis Gillen notes, “Fred and Jake presumably would have been su=ocated by Andy’s civil 
service mentality; they had to establish their own identity” (Gillen 1993, 37). At one point, their 
dialogue echoes Hirst and Spooner’s in No Man’s Land, as they, too, remember each other by 
other names.  eir dialogue also returns to #e Dwarfs: 
Listen here, Pete, Len said. Why do you always call me Weinblatt? My name is Weinstein. 
Always has been. (Pinter 1990, 17)
 e logic of the word-games works according to the r hythm that has always been central in 
Pinter’s plays: “Rhythm is extremely crucial to me. I  nd it very di@cult to accept a line which 
is somehow inharmonious” (Pinter 1999)
2
.  us, Jake and Fred discuss the life of Riley in a 
rhythmic way:
2
  As Pinter read out scenes from his plays, his fascination with language, in all respects and in all of its nuances, were so apparent that 
the interrogation scene in The Birthday Party seemed to work largely by rhythm.
70 Dilek Inan From Room to Tomb: Moonlight 
FRED A marvellous people.
JAKE A proud people too.
FRED Watchful.
JAKE Wary.
FRED T ouchy.
JAKE Bristly.
FRED Vengeful.
JAKE Absolutely ferocious, to be quite frank.
FRED Kick you in the balls as soon as look at you. (Pinter 1998, 361-2).
 e rhythm is imperative in all their dialogues. Red ucing death to a logical/rational conclusion, 
Jake talks about his father’s love; he tells Fred, “I shall love him and be happy to pay the full price 
of that love” (Pinter 1998, 367), but the emotion dissolves into rhythm and wordplay:
FRED Which is the price of death.
JAKE  e price of death, yes.
FRED  an which there’s no greater price.
JAKE  an which?
FRED  an which.
   Pause
   Death –
JAKE Which is the price of love.
FRED A great great price.
JAKE A great and deadly price.
FRED But strictly in accordance with the will of God.
JAKE And the laws of nature.
FRED And common or garden astrological logic.
JAKE It’s the  rst axiom.
FRED And the last.
JAKE It may well be both tautologous and contradictory (Pinter 1998, 367-8).
 e verbal game-playing centres on their father, who is also a dream-dad who has left his fortune 
to his new-born son Jake.  e audience is told that his father has called a meeting with the 
trustees (who were allowed to go to the lavatory just one and a half times a session) and “ e 
motion was carried, nine votes to four, Jorrocks abstaining” (Pinter 1998, 362) (the motion here 
71 LITERATURE
may also suggest bowel motion). Unfortunately, there is no fortune and it is, therefore, Jake’s 
conclusion that his father is a mountebank, a child, a shyster, a fool, a villain, or adds Fred, a 
saint.  ey parody patriarchal power through the ide a that Andy has blown all his money on 
a gambling party. His being “a feared force in the temples of the just” (Pinter 1998, 362) may 
have distanced his sons from him. And as Gillen argues, “As a civil servant, Andy would have 
had neither the means nor the inclination to provide Jake with the freedom to write nor the 
sensitivity nor patience to deal with Fred’s rebellion against what Andy regards as ‘the structure 
which after all ensured the ordered government of all our lives’” (Gillen 1993, 33).
 ey verbalise true or false memories of their fathe r, tinged with sympathy/pity and/or bitterness. 
 ey are obsessed with him – “Spiritually furtive, p olitically bankrupt, morally scabrous and 
intellectually abject, spasmodically rampant, poetically downtrodden” (Pinter 1998, 370), yet 
they love their father and believe he remains proud and  ery. Nevertheless, the sons and the 
father never occupy the same territory.  ey perform a scene of denial in which two sons reject 
their father, their past, their familial bondage. Pinter has stated that he was excited by “the image 
of one family dislocated but very much part of each other” (Gussow 1993, 105). In this context, 
the play echoes Betrayal, in which Robert verbally tortures Emma via the thought that he could 
easily be a total stranger. 
As for their mother, there is a sexual overtone: when Fred asks about her, Jake replies, “Don’t talk 
dirty to me” (Pinter 1998, 372).  eir mother’s fond recollections of them are dispelled by Andy, 
 rst through mockery then through memories of their challenge to his authority. Bel insists that 
they were good boys who helped with the washing-up, the drying. Andy insists that they were 
bastards and Jake refused even to clean out the bloody broom cupboard. In a later telephone 
conversation, which is also the climax of the play, Bel tells the boys that their father is at death’s 
door; the boys claim to be a Chinese laundry. Hearing their refusal to recognise her, Bel plays 
along with their game and asks if they are dry cleaners as well.
3
 Again the line between being a 
family and total strangers is blurred. 
In Moonlight, “Space is not defended as an extension of personality, but is merely a location 
occupied by characters who are isolated from their fellows” (Peacock 1997, 56). On three 
occasions, Maria and her husband Ralph simply emerge from the darkness into various stage 
locations.  ey appear with the stories from the pas t. Maria, Bel’s best friend, enters the boys’ 
territory. Her monologue includes memories of the time when Fred and Jake were little boys, 
and when she had a great a=ection for their father. Her portrait of the young Andy is a contrast 
to Andy’s present ill-tempered personality:
How he danced. One of the great waltzers. An elegance and grace long gone. A  rmness 
and authority so seldom encountered. […] Your mother was marvellously young and 
quickening every moment. I – I must say – particularly when I saw your mother being 
swirled across the <oor by your father – felt buds breaking out all over the place. I thought 
I’d go mad (Pinter 1998, 333). 
3 
Burkman asks, ‘If they are good sons who do help with the cleaning, why do they seem to be washing or cleaning their parents away? 
Has the potentiality and fertility of water and washing been replaced by an arid, dry cleaning. Burkman, ‘Echo[es] in Moonlight, 56.
72 Dilek Inan From Room to Tomb: Moonlight 
Later in the play, Maria’s husband Ralph makes a similar entry into the boys’ territory to give his 
monologue. Ralph, a former referee with an impotent whistle, talks to them about the past and 
their father; “ e man was a thinker. […]  e trouble with so much thinking, though, or with 
that which calls itself thinking, is that it’s like farting Annie Laurie down a keyhole. A waste of your 
time and mine” (Pinter 1998, 342). Ralph mocks “thinking”: “it’s confusing you, it’s blinding you 
[...] it’s making you so dizzy that by the end of the day you don’t know whether you’re on your arse 
or your elbow, you don’t know whether you’re coming or going” (Pinter 1998, 342).
Pinter recycles the theme of betrayal through the appearances of Maria and Ralph. Andy recalls 
the day Maria invited him to her <at for a slice of plumdu=, which has a sexual connotation, 
as with the plumdu= incident in Family Voices. Andy betrayed Bel with Maria: “But think of 
our past. [...]  ink of the months I betrayed you w ith her. [...] she betrayed you with your 
husband and she betrayed her own husband – and me – with you!” (Pinter 1998, 351). Bel 
neither denies nor con rms her relationship with Ma ria.  e triangular relationship echoes Old 
Times and indeed Betrayal where all the characters betray and are betrayed. Andy says, “I had 
her in our bedroom, by the way, once or twice, on our bed. I was a man at the time. Pause. You 
probably had her in the same place, of course. In our bedroom, on our bed” (Pinter 1998, 352). 
Nevertheless, what was once the subject that haunted Pinter’s plays is now treated with half-
comic detachment. Having dealt with repression, torture and violent death in his recent work, 
Pinter has a derisive approach to his recurrent theme of betrayal in Moonlight. It is a mockery of 
betrayal, a mockery of the relationships in so many of Pinter’s plays. 
Just as Maria and Ralph drift in and out of Jake and Fred’s room, they also arrive and depart from 
Andy and Bel’s room. Obsessed with their own super  cial life, they fail to see that Andy is unwell. 
 ey talk about their cottage and boast about their children’s success. Ralph recalls a shared past, 
but it is denied by Andy. In contrast to the characters in the memory plays (Old Times, No Man’s 
Land), Andy does not create an imaginary past; he denies the existence of any past: “I was a civil 
servant. I had no past. I remember no past. Nothing ever happened” (Pinter 1998, 378). 
However, one of the few things Andy does claim to remember is that a woman walked towards 
him across a darkening room. At this moment a faint light appears on Bridget’s area, which 
suggests that the woman who walked towards Andy was Bridget. She says, “I am walking slowly 
in a dense jungle. But I’m not su=ocating. I can breathe.  at is because I can see the sky through 
the leaves” (Pinter 1998, 336). Bridget describes death in pastoral terms in order to comfort her 
father who is so worried about death. She describes the <owers that surround her and the soft 
turf under her feet. Her pastoral language is associated with a celebratory attitude, even though 
she “crossed so many  erce landscapes to get here.  orns, stones, stinging nettles, barbed wire, 
skeletons of men and women in ditches.  ere was no hiding there.  ere was no yielding. 
 ere was no solace, no shelter” (Pinter 1998, 337). Her landscape is desired but formless, 
mysterious, and impenetrable. Her description of the landscape recalls the pastoral space in 
Mountain Language, which also had a protective function for the female character: 
But here there is shelter. I can hide. I am hidden.  e <owers surround me but they do not 
imprison me. I am free. Hidden but free. I’m a captive no longer. I’m lost no longer. No 
73 LITERATURE
one can  nd me or see me. I can be seen only by eye s of the jungle, eyes in the leaves. But 
they don’t want to harm me (Pinter 1998, 337). 
She inhabits a dream world of velvet odour, which is  lled by an echo like a bell: a remnant of the 
pastoral tradition links nature with human emotion – a realm of woman and country. 
In a sense, Bridget is a more con dent reworking of Deborah in A Kind of Alaska. Bridget, too, 
is the teenage girl who is estranged from the family and inhabits a kind of Alaska. She explains 
that she has been to barren dead spaces. Like Bridget, Pinter was 15 when the war ended.  us 
her descriptions may suggest images of the Second World War; she admits discovering “skeletons 
of men and women in ditches” (Pinter 1998, 337). 
Pinter said, that in writing Moonlight, he “found a sense of how the dead were present”:
Andy says at one point that he doesn’t know what death is. It’s a question of the horizon. He 
doesn’t know how light it is, how dark it is, anything. He doesn’t know what the attributes 
of death are. But all this time Bridget is walking around in his life. As a ghost, she is present 
in his life. But he can’t de ne her. He can’t hold her (Gussow 1993, 124). 
It is as if Andy’s dying and Bridget’s unite and they protect each other from fear. His  nal words 
are “T ell Bridget not to be frightened. T ell Bridget I don’t want her to be frightened” (Pinter 
1998, 384). For once in all of Pinter’s plays, the division between human being’s personal spaces 
is bridged. 
 e play  nishes with Bridget’s description of a fam ily invitation to a party and her own solitary 
arrival at a dark, deserted house bathed in moonlight. She stands there in the moonlight and 
waits for the moon to go down. John Peter suggests that Bridget’s waiting for the moon to set is 
“a human question mark facing the unknown” (Peter 1993, 15). Alternatively, the play’s director, 
David Leveaux, stated that Bridget’s monologue re<ects her total separation from her parents. In 
a way her sense of exile describes the moment of her death. Leveaux felt that Pinter was trying to 
put on stage “something that is almost unspeakable which is the experience of death” (Billington 
1996, 344). Nevertheless, Moonlight’s  nishing on an expectation gives the play an opt imistic relish 
and reminds us that there has always been more hope in Pinter’s work than critics have generally 
appreciated. In #e Dwarfs, Len trusted the light, which is always present even in the darkest night:
there’s always a point of light in the centre of the lens, in the centre of your sight. […] 
 ere’s always, even in the darkest night, a pinch, a fragment of light, poised in front of 
you. […] What this point of light does, it indicates the angle of your orbit. […] It gives a 
sense of direction, even if you never move from the spot. (Pinter 1990, 7).
All Pinter’s plays are about their titles. And moonlight is a pinch of light that illumines the 
darkness of the universe. Almost literally, the play itself is a fragment of light and hope showing 
direction. 
Moonlight shows Pinter resisting his own grief and con rming , with great sincerity, the irresistible 
cycles of birth and decay, life and decomposition in an age where there are no value-systems or 
74 Dilek Inan From Room to Tomb: Moonlight 
beliefs, and there is no salvation.  e play leaves the audience with fear; indeed, it echoes the 
 nale of Party Time. Jimmy describes how he is trapped and  lled with the su=ocating darkness. 
Bridget, too, is trapped in a dark place. As Regal points out, “Both Jimmy and Bridget are 
steeped in light and yet, at the same time, trapped in perpetual darkness, ultimately cut o= 
from the world around them” (Regal 1995, 126), but the crucial di=erence is that in Moonlight 
Bridget’s experience is confronted, not deferred and shirked. 
3. Conclusion
 ere is a studied image of the past, a feeling of f amiliarity and the power of habit and repetition. 
As Roland Barthes calls every text “a new tissue of past citations” (Barthes 1981, 39), so Moonlight 
shows a great deal of similarity to Pinter’s earlier work. With Moonlight, Pinter re-imagines and 
reshapes his mostly dramatised patterns such as the working of memory, male-female perceptions 
of space, alienation, old age and  nally, of course , the end in death.  us, Bridget symbolises an 
anti-spatial environment, a conceptual rather than an embodied,  lled, physical space. Although 
Moonlight appeared to draw a di=erent picture to Pinter’s political plays, the similarity is striking 
in the sense that Moonlight, like his political plays, re<ects Pinter’s private passions – passions 
that are restored with an awareness of human su=ering and the human capacity to endure. His 
1974 poem draws a relationship between moonlight, death, and the blackness of our age – a 
poem, demonstrating Pinter’s pessimism as an intellectual investigator, and his will’s optimism 
as a dissident humanitarian. 
LATER
Later. I look out at the moon.
I lived here once.
I remember the song.
Later. No sound here.
Moon on linoleum.
A child frowning.
Later. A voice singing.
I open the back door.
I lived here once.
Later. I open the back door.
Light gone. Dead trees.
Dead linoleum. Later.
Later. Blackness moving very fast.
Blackness fatly.
I live here now.  (1974) 
75 LITERATURE
Bibliography
Althusser, L. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy, transl. by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Appleyard, B. 1984. The New Light that Burns within Harold Pinter: An Interview. The Times, 16 March: 13.
Armistead, C. 1993. Harold’s New Baby. Guardian, 3 February: 3.
Barthes, R. 1981. Theory of the Text. In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young, 31-47. London: Routledge 
and Kegan Paul.
Billington, M. 1993. Pinter’s Most Moving Work. Guardian, 8 September: 1.
– – –. 1996. The Life and Work of Harold Pinter. London: Faber and Faber.
Burkman, K. 1994. Echo[es] in Moonlight. The Pinter Review: 54-60.
Hall, S. 1996. New Ethnicities. In Stuart Hall, Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. D. Morley & K.H. Chen, 441–9. London: 
Routledge.
Coveney, M. 1993. Under a Dark Moon. Observer, 12 September: 49.
Ghilardi-Santacatterina, M., and A. Sierz. 1997. Pinter and the Pinteresque: An Author Trapped by His Own Image?. In Drama on 
Drama: Dimensions of Theatricality on the Contemporary British Stage, ed. Nicole Boireau, 108-20. London: Macmillan Press. 
Gillen, F. 1992-93. “Whatever Light is Left in the Dark”: Harold Pinter’s MOONLIGHT, The Pinter Review: Annual Essays, 31-7.
Grant, S. 1993. Pinter: My Plays, my Polemics, my Pad. Independent, 20 September: 13.
Gussow, M. 1993. Conversations. London: Nick Hern Books.
Hall, P. 1971. A Director’s Approach. In A Casebook on Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, ed. John Lahr, 9-25. New York: Grove Press.
Hoyle, M. 1993. Mail on Sunday, 12 September: 13.
Jongh, N. 1993. Evening Standard, 8 September: 8.
Lahr, J. 1993. Pinter’s Night Sweats. New Yorker, 20 September: 108-10.
Morley, S. 1993. Pinter Power. Spectator, 18 September: 53. 
Nightingale, B. 1993. Pinter Stages a Refreshing Return to the Family Business. The Times, 8 October: 3.
Peacock, D. 1997. Harold Pinter and the New British Theatre. London: Greenwood Press.
Peter, J. 1993. Sleepless in N1. Sunday Times, 12 September: 15.
Pinter, H. 1998. Moonlight. Plays: Four. London: Faber and Faber.
– – –. 1990. The Dwarfs. London: Faber and Faber.
– – –. 1998. Later. In Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-1998. London: Faber and Faber.
– – –. 1998. Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-1998. London: Faber and Faber.
– – –. 1999. Pinter at Cambridge Conference. 
Regal, M. 1995. A Question of Timing. London: Macmillan Press.
Sexton, D. 1995. Life in the Old Dog Yet. Daily Telegraph, 18 March: 12.
Taylor, P. 1993. Ill met by Moonlight. Independent, 9 September: 13.