Family Voices

Family Voices is a radio play by Harold Pinter written in 1980 and first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 22 January 1981.

Family Voices exposes the story of a mother, son, and dead husband and father through a series of letters that the mother and son have written to one another and that each speaks aloud. The son has moved off to the city and is surrounded by odd characters and circumstances. The mother, who apparently never receives her son's letters, questions angrily why her son never responds to her letters, and brings news of his father's death. Towards the end of the play, the father speaks as it were from the grave, "Just to keep in touch" (81).

A series of interlocking monologues spoken by three Voices (One, Two, and Three), Family Voices exposes themes involving difficulties of communication, the vicissitudes of memory and the past, and family dysfunction familiar from Pinter's other dramatic works, employing some of Pinter's well-known stylistic traits. The peculiar circumstances of the characters evoke the Theatre of the Absurd. The mother and son continually have trouble communicating with each other, resulting in more intense attempts at communication that only serve to make the situation more absurd.

It was first broadcast as a radio play directed by Sir Peter Hall and performed by Michael Kitchen (Voice One), Peggy Ashcroft (Voice Two), and Mark Dignam (Voice Three) on BBC Radio 3 on 22 January 1981.

Subsequently, it was presented in a "platform performance" directed by Hall at London's Cottesloe Theatre with the same director and cast.

In October 1982, it was presented again as part of Other Places, along with two of Pinter's other works, a one-act play A Kind of Alaska and a shorter play Victoria Station, also directed by Hall. For this production, the cast included:

Other theatre personnel were:

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