Moonlight

by Harold Pinter

In one of the most exciting theatrical events of the nineties, Harold Pinter has written his first full-length play since the internationally acclaimed Betrayal in 1978. Pinter, "one of the most important playwrights of our day" (The New York Times), again proves himself a vital and innovative literary voice. Set in two bedrooms and an indefinite dark space, Moonlight is the story of a father on his deathbed, rehashing his youth, loves, lusts, and betrayals with his wife, while simultaneously his two sons - clinical, conspiratorial, the bloodless, intellectual offspring of a hearty anti-intellectual - sit in the shadows, speaking enigmatically and cyclically, stepping around and around the fact of their estrangement from their father, rationalizing their love-hate relations with him and the distance that they are unable to close even when their mother attempts to call them home. In counterpoint to their uncomprehending isolation between the extremes of the death before life and the death after is their younger sister, Bridget, who lightly bridges the gaps between youth and age, death and life.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, Fiction, Nobel Prize, British Literature

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993) and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.

Reviews

[kiho · Rating 3 out of 5]

When you're ready to give up on it because Pinter is crossing the line from clinically obtuse to dead unreadable it somehow gets really good.

Contains among the most gorgeous language of any of his plays.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moonlight is a play written by Harold Pinter in 1993. Upon its premiere, it stood out in Pinter's body of work because it was the first full-length play he had written in 15 years after a number of shorter ones, and it avoided the political themes that had been preoccupying him of late.

Essentially this is a tale of family estrangement as the patriarch lies dying. Andy, a man in his fifties, claims to be on his deathbed and asks his wife Bel where his sons and his daughter are in his last moments. His account of his situation and his look back at his life are marked with a kind of fury and bitterness, the old image of the working-class man who complains towards the end of his life that he never got any respect:

Andy: I'll tell you something about me. I sweated over a hot desk all my working life and nobody ever found a flaw in my working procedures. Nobody ever uncovered the slightest hint of negligence or misdemeanour. Never. I was an inspiration to others. I inspired the young men and women down from here and down from there. I inspired them 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. I was a first-class civil servant. I was admired and respected.

In another location, his sons Jake and Fred chat. These two characters' dialogue is distinguished by wordplay that never lets up, logorrhea, and a sort of inability to take anything seriously. As Jake speaks of his father's old plan to leave his estate to him:

Jake: The vicar stood up. He said that it was a very unusual thing, a truly rare and unusual thing, for a man in the prime of his life to leave – without codicil or reservation – his personal fortune to his newborn son the very day of that baby's birth – before the boy had had a chance to say a few words or aspire to the unknowable or cut for partners or cajole the japonica or tickle his arse with a feather –

Fred: Whose arse?

Jake: It was an act, went on the vicar, which, for sheer undaunted farsightedness, unflinching moral resolve, stern intellectual vision, classic philosophical detachment, passionate religious fervour, profound emotional intensity, bloodtingling spiritual ardour, spellbinding metaphysical chutzpah – stood alone.

Fred: Tantamount to a backflip in the lotus position.

Jake: It was an act, went on the vicar, without a vestige of lust but with any amount of bucketfuls of lustre.

However, Moonlight is more than a straightforward depiction of family estrangement, it is tinged with mystery. The facts set out by Andy about his family don't seem to accord with the past that Fred and Jake describe. (This is not the first time Pinter has had two sides of a family that don't jive and seem to be living in separate realities; see his earlier short play Family Voices). An ethereal quality is brought by Bridget, the daughter, who appears only in a couple of scenes, alone and outside the action of the two sides of the family in their respective locations. She delivers a curious monologue which gives the play its title.

In my opinion, Harold Pinter was doing some of his best work in these years, and I greatly appreciated his turn to the political. But Moonlight fails to move me as much, being a bit too mysterious and never firmly establishing Bridget's role and message. As always, Pinter has a fine way with words and there's some laughs, so this is worth reading if obtained as part of a collected plays (like Faber & Faber's Plays 4). And who knows, perhaps in a live staging it all works more effectively than read off the page.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first time reading a play, I have had it on my shelf for months. I enjoyed reading it, I love watching plays so tried to imagine how it would be staged etc. I will be honest, I had to read other reviews/analysis to build a better understanding - but for such a short play so much was said, if not explicitly. Will watch it too if I get chance!

[claire zachanassian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moonlight hakkında bazıları Harold Pinter'ın en iyi işi olduğunu bazılarıysa diğer oyunlarının yanında oldukça sönük kaldığını söylüyor. Hangisinin doğru olduğuna karar vermek oldukça zor çünkü metin farklı düzlemlerde anlatılan zamanı birbiri ardınca ilerlemeyen sahnelerden oluşuyor. Oyunun örgüsünü kurmaksa sezgilere kalıyor.

Ve Bridget tam bir belirsizlik. Oyun Bridget'ın dokunaklı konuşmasıyla sona eriyor.

"Bir gün biri bana sanırım annem , ya da babam her kimse bana bir davete gidiyoruz demişti. Sen de çağrılırsın. Ama senin kendi başına, yalnız gelmen gerekiyor. Süslenmen gerekmez. Yalnızca ay batana dek bekleyeceksin. Davetin nerede olduğunu bana söylediler. Bir yolun sonunda bir evdeydi. Ama bana ay batana dek, davetin başlamayacağını bildirdiler. Eski bir giysi giydim ve ayın batmasını bekledim. Uzun süre bekledim. Sonra o eve doğru yola çıktım. Ay pırıl pırıldı. Çok sakindi. Eve vardığımda ev ay ışığına bürünmüştü. Ev, orman içindeki açıklık, yol, tümü de ay ışığına bürünmüştü. Evin içi karanlıktı. Tüm pencereler karanlıktı. Ses yoktu.oracıkta ay ışığında durdum, ayın batmasını bekledim."

Oyunu ilk kez sahneleyen David Leveaux'ya göre bu konuşma yalnız ölmek hakkındadır ve onun ölüm anını anlatıyordur. Bridgetı'ın ebeveynlerinden bütünüyle ayrılışının ve sürgününün bir parçasıdır. Levaaux Pinter'a oyunu açan uyurgezer kızın ölü olduğu sorduğunda Pinter
"That would seem to be case. Iwant to put my cards on the table about one thing. There are many things i dont about the play but i have a strong feeling Bridget is dead." cevabını verir.Yine de bizi kararsız bırakan bridget ve oyun hakkında ikna etmeyen bir cevap.

Moonlight'ı düşünürken Harold Pinter'ın "Art,Truth and Politics" isimli Nobel konuşmasından şu kesite rastladım.

"There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.
I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did."

Bana kalırsa Moonlight tam da böyle bir oyundu.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the things that Harold Pinter does really well is leaving the story to the reader's imagination. In my experience reading his work, it has always centered around the theme of infidelity (maybe because HP was known for his open affairs with other women while he was married to his first wife?)

This is the third play I've read from him (the others being The Lover and The Collection) and the only thing that makes me not like them at times is the subject matter.

What makes Pinters plays so great, is that he leaves amazing "pauses" that give you something to think about. His plays are most significant for what they don't say, verbally - but rather, for what we know isn't being said at all.

You, the reader, will not always be told what the characters are thinking but you will feel what they are feeling and you will understand the complexity of things that aren't being said and how difficult some things are to talk about.

This play, in particular, is about Andy (who is dying), his wife Bel, his two sons, and their daughter Brigitte.

Andy rehashes with his wife their mutual affair with a woman named Maria, who he insists on having at his deathbed, although Bel does not want her there.

His sons are heartless about their father's dying and cycle their way around their estrangement from him by talking about who he was and how they knew him.

"Be careful of Silvio, he gets violent sometimes." Fred warns.

Later: "Did you go to Silvio's memorial today?" Fred asks.
"Yes, I did," Jake says, "Everybody was there...Did you know him?"
"Like a father," Fred finishes.

Jake and Fred are inconsiderate to the world around them and are oftentimes referred to by their father as, "sponging parasitical pair of ponces." This does not, however, leave Andy un-criticized. In fact, most of the play he is speaking sarcastically to and with his wife and is mocked by his sons in other scenes.

Vincent Canby wrote in the NYTimes that Jake and Fred are "articulate slobs."
"They amuse themselves with drink and by spinning rude vaudeville routines about the unloving, penny-pinching mediocrity they call Dad only in derision." (Canby)

While Andy is not a bad man, his dysfunctional family chooses not to consider him as either good nor bad. They know that he is a "good" man, in the fundamental societal meaning of the word. He spent his life as a devoted public servant who worked diligently and never intentionally caused harm to anyone - but does his family love him?

"And still we call him Dad."

The daughter, Brigitte, is only visible to the audience, and speaks in poems about the world being blanketed only by moonlight. I only learned later, when trying to decipher the meaning to this play, that Brigitte is dead.

Brigitte is rarely spoken of and only once is there a "flashback" scene of her (still, it is never openly mentioned that she is dead) where she tells her older brothers that she wants to be a Physiotherapist and help heal people in pain, she even assists her older brother, Fred, with a tremendous neck pain. She is seen as the only sympathetic and forgiving member of the family, "the confused ghost of a 17-year-old...who now creeps around the house trying not to wake her parents" (Canby)

Despite the crude, distasteful comments that Andy makes towards Bel, who remains serene and saintlike, she is not ignorant to her husband and the "lustful, lascivious life" that he led. And even though there is a clear tension between the two, the play is not full of confrontation - exactly the opposite, in fact. The vitriol and insults are given in a sarcastic, heartfelt way that the reader knows is full of scorn and unsaid anger.

Brigitte's role is never fully established, nor is her message, which makes me uncomfortable. This is something that Pinter does often, ambiguity, and it is always frustrating to everyone, whether you like it or not.

Moonlight is not a forthright announcement of family dysfunction, but a view of how real dysfunctional families live. Pinter writes through "insinuation, not plot." (Wolf, Variety)

While this is not the best of Pinter's plays, if you are a fan of theatre, of his work, or of disassembling everything you read, than I do recommend it. It is very short and I finished the play in under a half an hour.

Note: This play has the distinguishment of coining the phrase, All will be well. And all manner of things shall be well.

[Lena T · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I’m beginning to understand why people like Pinter so much, but I’m not quite there yet

[Nick Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ever since I was a teenager I think I have had a fairly good intuitive sense of the Pinteresque. I’m not saying I could define what it is in any useful manner, but I can recognize it. But my knowledge of Pinter is centred on his early work. I’ve seen a production of No Man’s Land, but otherwise the Pinter plays I know, from either seeing productions or reading scripts, are the early work from the late 1950s and early 1960s. I have, however, seen a number of films he has scripted: the 1960s work tend to sound deeply Pinteresque, the characters inhabiting Pinter’s world, but this fades away in the later ones – and the later ones begin at least with The French Lieutenant’s Woman in the early 1980s. This might mean that Pinter changed, became less ‘Pinteresque’ (or what I think of as Pinteresque) or it might just mean that the film companies wanted less bizarre scripts. But now I’ve skipped ahead to the 1990s and Moonlight. When it was first produced in the late 1970s, Betrayal had been met with uncertainty – Pinter had changed but the critics weren’t sure if they liked it. Through the 1980s Pinter wrote a number of short works, although Betrayal’s reputation grew. And then in 1993 came Moonlight, Pinter’s first full length play (although it’s a short full length play) since Betrayal. I’ve not seen a production, only read it, and it feels like a Pinter play, but not as much as the older ones did...or maybe even a parody. There’s the same sense of menace and wit, but it’s not as witty, not as menacing. A family drama, the father, Andy, is dying – and he’s an obnoxious character (there are no tears for the dying). He reminisces, his wife, Bel, listens and puts her own versions of events. He cheated on her, but it seems she cheated on him – but he treats the world with a certain contempt. We see their two sons, Jake and Fred, acting out a fantasy world, a complex and ridiculous spy narrative – we never see them with Jake, but their world seems a reaction to their father...but I find it difficult to pin down what all this is doing. It’s a play where all the important things seem to happen in the gaps between the words, but I’m not sure what’s actually there. I found it interesting, but disappointing. Of course, my disappointment might be because I was trying to read it as though it was one of Pinter’s older works and found it a little insipid in comparison, but maybe Pinter had new concerns and methods and I was missing them, trapped by my preconceptions. I often don’t have a clear sense what a Pinter work is doing, but they have a vitality in the detail that pushes me to return: I didn’t find that vitality in Moonlight.

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harold Pinter’s “Moonlight” was mysterious, telling and extremely intriguing. Hidden beneath the sentences were slight references and indications that expressed an entire lifetime, slowly unfolding as we progressed into the play. At first, I was a little hesitant, wondering where the story was really going to go. At the end I was left with a curious emotion of feeling full but empty, kind of like a pot filled ⅓ with water (if you know what I mean). When I visualize “Moonlight” I think of a dark red space with multi-coloured scribbles, that's kind of how the book felt. It told a lot about love, the different ways in which someone can love someone, cheat in the name of love, loving Woman 2 in the name of loving Woman 1. A love triangle between Andy, Bel, Maria and Ralph slowly unfolded, bit by bit with amazing characterization which made me really understand them as individuals. It was strange in that it was incredibly compelling, it told a lot in very few words which made it a lot of fun to slowly analyze and pick at bit by bit. I think Pinter was a genius in how he wrote it, in only 112 pages I felt like I experienced a different world altogether, but to read this book you need time, patience and a lot of emotional intellectuality. I found myself thinking about it all day and the next after I finished it.

[Vel Veeter]

In this one-act play, a man lies dying on his bed as various people in his life visit him. As he discusses elements of his life, there’s a growing sense that what he believed to life to contain is not held equally in belief from those others around him.

There’s this outsized sense of the importance of a deathbed scene. This obviously applies very much to literature, and there’s obviously been numerous famous deathbed scenes like Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, Valentin in Henry James’s The American, and of course Beth in Little Women, to the point that it’s a point of contention and dark humor in the more recent novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. And so taking this moment, and deconstructing it a little bit feels ripe for a play. A lot Pinter’s plays take on those little scenes of tropic familiarity or language usage and press on them to try to figure out not only how they work, but why we insist they work a certain way.

[Marta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un leggero fastidio (A slight ache) 1958 ** e ½
Una serata fuori (A night out) 1959 ***
Voci di famiglia (Family voices) 1980 ***
Una specie di Alaska (A kind of Alaska) 1982 **** ispirato a Risvegli di Oliver Sacks
Victoria Station 1982 *
Chiaro di Luna (Moonlight) 1993 ***
Discorso tenuto in occasione del Nobel per la letteratura - 2005 ****

Presenti temi tipici di Pinter quali l'incertezza tra reale e irreale e i rapporti familiari disturbanti.

[Mer Fenton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m gonna be so honest, idk the last time I read something where I felt like it went so far over my head that I could hardly grasp any of it. Maybe I just need more experience reading plays, but idk. I was deeply touched though about the line on thinking you know who you are until you start talking to someone and realize you are someone else.

[cedarbucket · Rating 3 out of 5]

Might have taken a star off my rating if it weren't Pinter, to be honest. I find it a very weak work of his. It's the first play by him I didn't want to reread right away. Didn't intrigue me in any way and didn't make me feel anything.

[Dilek]

Ne yazık ki oyunun Mitos-Boyut’tan çıkan kopyasında pek çok dizgi hatası var. Hakkını vermek için bir kez de orijinalinden okunmasında fayda var.

[Beni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meisterhaft

[Colin Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably one I’ll have to sit with for a while longer

[Alli · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this as part of my reading of Nobel Laureates in Literature. Not my favorite play, but it was alright. I didn't realize that this was the source of the lines "All will be well. And all manner of things shall be well."

[Zoë Birss · Rating 3 out of 5]

The dialogue in Moonlight is expertly crafted. Not a word is wasted. This is my first Pinter play to read, after seeing No Man's Land performed earlier this month. From the two Pinter has impressed upon me that he is a master of the English language. This I value highly in anything I read.

Moonlight is a tragedy of broken family relationships at the apparent end of a man's life. Like No Man's Land, it circles themes of deep regret, bitterness, loss, and sexuality in the evening ages. Also like No Man's land, character's dialogue repeat and contradict one another. Memories are fluid, and every character has their own perspective.

While I love No Man's Land, I found this play far less engaging and interesting. Though the wordcraft kept me reading, I found the story and characters flat, and the bitterness difficult to digest. I sensed no real resolution. Finally, though the daughter of the dying man has some beautiful lines, I was not able to discern her necessary role in the play.

I recognize that much of my criticism may be due to my own difficulty interpreting the play. Still, I prefer enigmatic stories that inspire me to dig deep for their meaning. This one simply did not provoke me so.

[Sylvia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moonlight is a play about a man name Andy who is on his deathbed reciting his childhood life, his love life, his lusts, and his betrayals with his wife. On the other hand, his two sons talk about his love-hate relationship with his father.

i thought this book was very interesting to read because i hardly read plays, so it was a change from all the other book i've read. It was a very sad play for me to read because it reminded me of my own father. My father passed away when i was only 8 years old and it's sad that i didn't even get to say bye to him and Andy did.

[Patrick Dyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quintessential Pinter with some really beautiful writing, though I did feel the relationship between Fred and Jack could have been a little stronger. Still, a good quick read and an essential for Pinter fans.

[Michael P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a first impression. It needs a more seasoned reading, as Pinter always does.

[Gilgamesh Nabeel · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was something strange I like it but did not love it

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

All the painful familial hate and misogyny that typifies Pinter...

[Giorgi Komakhidze · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a civil servant. I had no past. I remember no past. Nothing ever happened.