The Collection (play)

The Collection is a 1961 play by Harold Pinter featuring two couples, James and Stella and Harry and Bill. It is a comedy laced with typically "Pinteresque" ambiguity and "implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses" (Oxford English Dictionary).

The Collection takes place on a divided stage, shared by a house in London's Belgravia, and a flat in Chelsea, with another space between them where telephone calls take place; according to Pinter's stage description, the "three areas" comprise "two peninsulas and a promontory" (Three Plays [43]).

Bill, a dress designer in his twenties, lives with Harry, a man in his forties, in Harry's house, in Belgravia, which has "Elegant decor" (Three Plays [43]). Stella, another dress designer, in her thirties like her husband and business partner James, lives with him in "James' flat" in Chelsea, which has "Tasteful contemporary furnishing." According to Pinter's stage description, whereas the set for Harry's house ("Stage left") "comprises the living-room, hall, front door and staircase to the first floor," with a "Kitchen exit below staircase," the set for James's flat in Chelsea ("Stage right") "comprises the living-room only," while "Off stage right" there are "other rooms and front door" and "Up stage centre on promontory [a] telephone box," where the phone calls are made (Three Plays [43]).

The plot concerns whether or not Stella and Bill had a one-night stand while away on business in Leeds.

One evening while at home Harry (Kane) and Bill (Lloyd), a dress designer, receive an unsettling anonymous phone call (48), which is to be followed by a further unsettling visit from a man who will refuse to leave his name (49). Following some apparently trivial conversation between Stella, another dress designer, and James (Horne), her husband and business partner, that occurs in his flat (44–45), James has left it to call on Bill at Harry's house, revealing that he was the anonymous caller and is the unexpected visitor. James confronts Bill with the confession of his wife Stella that she has had a one-night affair with Bill (53–55). Bill first claims that she invented the story (58–59), but he admits to their having "kissed a bit" (59), he qualifies "that it never happened . . . what you say anyway," and further renders that version ambiguous:

JAMES: [...] Then I phoned.
Pause.
I spoke to her. [...] You were sitting on the bed, next to her.

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