One for the Road (Harold Pinter play)

One for the Road
Hardcover ed., Eyre Methuen Ltd, 1985 (Cover photo: Ivan Kyncl)
Written by	Harold Pinter
Date premiered	13 March 1984
Place premiered	The Lyric Studio, Hammersmith, London
Original language	English
Subject	Torture, rape, and murder of political prisoners; human rights
Genre	Drama
Setting	A room in a house in an unspecified location.
Official site

One for the Road is an overtly-political one-act play by Harold Pinter, which premiered at Lyric Studio, Hammersmith, in London, on 13 March 1984, and was first published by Methuen in 1984.

One for the Road, considered Pinter's "statement about the human rights abuses of totalitarian governments", was inspired, according to Antonia Fraser, by reading on May 19, 1983, Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, a book about torture on Argentina's military dictatorship; later, on January 1984, he got to write it after an argument with two Turkish girls at a family birthday party on the subject of torture.

The year following the publication, Pinter would visit Turkey with Arthur Miller "to investigate allegations of the torture and persecution of Turkish writers"; as he explains further in his interview with Nicholas Hern, "A Play and Its Politics", conducted in February 1985 and published in 1985 in the revised and reset Eyre Methuen hardback and in 1986 in the Grove Evergreen paperback and illustrated with production photographs taken at the premiere by Ivan Kyncl, torture of political prisoners in countries like Turkey "is systematic". Due to the tolerance and even support of such human rights abuses by the governments of Western countries like the United States, Pinter emphasizes (prophetically it turned out given later revelations about extraordinary rendition) in One for the Road how such abuses might happen in or at the direction of these democracies too.

In this play the actual physical violence takes place off stage; Pinter indirectly dramatizes such terror and violence through verbal and non-verbal allusions to off-stage acts of repeated rape of Gila, physical mutilation of Victor, and the ultimate murder of their son, Nicky. The effects of the violence that takes place off stage are, however, portrayed verbally and non-verbally on stage.

Though in the interview, Pinter says that he himself "always find[s] agitprop insulting and objectionable […] now, of course I'm doing the same thing". He observes that "when the play was done in New York, as the second part of a triple-bill [Other Places, directed by Alan Schneider, at the Manhattan Theatre Club (1984)], a goodly percentage of people left the theatre when it was over. They were asked why they were going and invariably they said, 'We know all about this. We don't need to be told.' Now, I believe that they were lying. They did not know about it and did not want to know".