Quentin Crisp in his Chelsea bedsit, circa 1980.

• Play title: The Room
• Author: Harold Pinter 
• Written: 1957
• Page count: 26

Summary

Rose and Bert occupy a single room in an old tenement house. She’s incessantly chatty while he’s the stolid, silent type. He’s 50 years old, and she’s 60. Their landlord, a Mr Kidd, or maybe it’s another name; anyway, he forgets how many tenants he has and even how many floors are in the apparently labyrinthine building. On the evening in question, it’s icy cold outside and dark too, but Bert needs to do a run in his van since that’s his job. Rose, who is soon all alone, is visited by a young couple named Sands, then by Mr Kidd, and finally by a mysterious, blind Black man named Riley. Each of the visitations – which intimate unsettling yet unclear dangers – makes the reclusive Rose ever more nervous and increasingly fearful. Finally, Bert gets home safely, and he finds Rose in the company of Riley who sits in an armchair by the gas stove. What exactly is occurring here? The play closes with a mysterious and suddenly violent scene.

The Room was the first play written by Harold Pinter. He wrote the work “in four afternoons” (16), and according to Bernard F. Dukore, it “ranks among the most astonishing first plays ever written” (25). The play depicts a strange domestic scene full of escalating levels of menace and fear, but the text offers no tangible explanations for the eventual happenings.

Ways to access the text: reading

It is reasonably easy to find a free copy of The Room online. For example, it is available via the Internet Archive.

There is no audiobook version of The Room to my knowledge. However, if you would like to listen to a selection of Pinter’s more famous plays, then please look up “BBC by Harold Pinter” on the Internet Archive. This is a selection of audio files of Pinter’s works that were aired on the BBC.

Why read The Room?

The Room is not among Pinter’s well-known plays nor is it his best work (no surprise since it was his first). It is nonetheless a solid introduction to his – at that point – emerging, distinctive style. It’s a short play that still manages to thoroughly unsettle a reader. One is unsure whether it should be treated as an allegory, straightforward realism, or Theatre of the Absurd. In fact, Pinter employs aspects of all three aforementioned genres. The main theme of the work is that of an impending threat. The threat is never just one thing – it includes a multitude of factors from the treacherous weather on a winter’s night to a polite, apparently bodiless voice that speaks in the dark basement of the building. Reading the play is like walking in on an odd scene in someone else’s house, and you know nothing about the people, their pasts, or why they act as strangely as they do. You leave that room even more confused, mentally fumbling for some sort of answer. If that intrigues you, then The Room is an apt introduction to Pinter.

Post-reading discussion/interpretation

Pinter’s Portrait of Inverted Fear

Harold Pinter’s most esteemed plays include The Homecoming, Betrayal, The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter, and The Caretaker. His first play entitled The Room was written in 1957 and though it has received some academic attention, it is usually overshadowed by the later works. The main ‘problems’ with the play are that the climactic ending is arguably too sudden, too brief, and too disproportionate for the otherwise well-crafted lead-in. Also, and probably more importantly, the work remains far too mysterious. Bernard Dukore helpfully explains that “Pinter does not consider himself obliged to inject a remedy or thematic summary in the final act simply because we have been brought up to expect, rain or sunshine, the last act “resolution”’ (6). Indeed, Dukore states that his own book on Pinter’s body of work “makes no attempt to explain the meanings of his [Pinter’s] plays. Rather it aims to explore Pinter’s dramatic and theatrical stratagems which provide ways of enjoying and appreciating his plays” (2). Despite this assertion, Dukore does, unsurprisingly, give significant insights into The Room and thereby provides a good general interpretation. For instance, one prominent and well-documented feature of The Room is the story of how Pinter was inspired to write it – “At a party in London, Pinter was ushered into a room where he saw two men. The small man talked while he prepared food for the other, a large lorry driver who had his cap on and did not speak a word” (16). The image stuck in Pinter’s mind and ended up being the defining blueprint for his first play. Even though Bernard Dukore, Michael Billington and Arnold P. Hinchliffe have all written books on Pinter’s collection of plays, and each of them mentions the inspiration for The Room, none of them have mined the fact for its interpretive importance. Incidentally, the ‘small man’ that Pinter saw in the room was Mr Quentin Crisp. Delving into the hidden connections between the play-inspiring room that Pinter haphazardly stepped into one evening in the mid-nineteen-fifties and the various bedsits that Mr Crisp occupied his entire adult life (in London and then New York) reveals, upon a little research, much about the theme of an impending threat.

Prior to outlining a new interpretation of The Room that complements existing criticism, it is helpful to briefly outline how others have interpretively approached the play. Dukore, for one, makes many insightful observations about the play. He notes its similarity to the realism of British kitchen-sink dramas of the 1950s. For instance, Rose busily cooks for her husband in their kitchen (come living-room come bedroom). Additionally, the working-class characters’ language “is naturalistic, as if tape-recorded, with mumbling, repetitiveness, poor grammar, incomplete sentences, non sequiturs, sudden shifts of subject matter, refusal or inability to leave a subject another character has left, and the like” (Dukore 4). Yet the scene progressively departs from straightforward realism when the conversations become a bit too disjointed, too odd, and reflective of something surreal rather than real. Dukore recognises that one may soon attempt to read the play allegorically, but he issues a warning by quoting Pinter – “When a character cannot be comfortably defined or understood in terms of the familiar, the tendency is to perch him on a symbolic shelf, out of harm’s way” (7). Billington echoes such sentiments and writes, “Patently Pinter, writing in haste over four days and simply opening a channel to his subconscious, did not set out to write an allegory” (68). Therefore, an allegorical reading appears ill-founded and an intellectual cop-out too. Then there is the play’s intrinsic “unsettling quality” (25), which Dukore explains as one of “the characteristics of the Theatre of the Absurd” (25). Pinter managed to create a quite specific effect – “events and actions are unexplained, and apparently illogical or unmotivated, [so] the world seems capricious or malevolent” (25). There is a hint of existential angst. Dukore states that “Fear of a menace may suggest the universal trauma of man in the universe” (25). When Dukore reduces the play to its essence, he simply writes “In The Room … characters who hope they have sanctuary try to defend themselves from intruders” (48). As a reader of the play, one understands that the ominous threat is external, unknowable, and imminent.

In Hinchliffe’s reading of The Room, he makes the observation that “Pinter’s terror and menace are greater because they exist in the house next door” (41). This intersects with Dukore’s point about the similarity of the play to kitchen-sink dramas. Mundane domestic scenes, which are immediately familiar and normally considered safe, become most unsettling when crazed violence erupts. Getting to the crux of why the play appears inexplicable, Hinchliffe talks about the pivotal character of Riley and uses a quote from George E. Wellwarth, author of The Theater of Protest and Paradox, to expand on his ideas.

“It is this Negro who causes most trouble in the play: ‘The Negro may symbolize death, the woman’s past, or some hidden guilt complex – probably the latter, since she is struck blind when her husband beats the Negro. But there is no hint as to what his function really is nor as to why the husband beats him so savagely. He is simply an emissary from the outside who has succeeded in breaking into the circle of light.’”

(Hinchliffe 46)

Hinchliffe’s reading highlights how the play refuses to offer succinct or comprehensive answers to the simplest of critical questions. Billington, like Hinchliffe, focuses on the character of Riley. However, he takes a quite different approach. He writes, “One aspect of The Room which has been little noticed, however, is its social accuracy: in particular, its portrait of a walled-in isolationism and paranoid xenophobia that was to become a feature of English life in the late 1950s” (Billington 70). For Billington, “the play’s dynamic” (67) arises chiefly from “the confrontation of an anxious recluse with the demands and pressures of the outside world” (67). One specific demand was that white, British people had to accustom themselves to the first substantial influx of foreigners including people of other races. In the 1950s, there was also a huge wave of economic migrants from Ireland. Riley is a homonym of Reilly (Irish name), so the Black man’s name appears to be a coded reference to all foreigners. When Billington reduces the play down to a key point, he sees Pinter’s play as “dealing with the perils of withdrawal from the outside world and the emotional hazard of turning a room into a fortress” (69).

All three aforementioned writers see The Room as being about Rose’s self-imposed imprisonment in a seemingly safe space. Dukore is sympathetic to Rose, whereas Billington’s reading hints at derogation. Yet question marks still abound. Who is Riley? Why is Bert so excessively violent? What is Rose hiding? Hinchliffe makes the bold claim that “In The Room, it is not so much, we feel, that motives are unknowable as that the author will not let us know them” (47). Dukore provides a helpful tip, even if he doesn’t quite follow through on it: “A logical starting point for an examination of The Room is Pinter’s statement, ‘My plays are what the titles are about’” (26). The Room is, therefore, chiefly about ‘the room’ that originally inspired the play: a room in Chelsea occupied by Mr Crisp and a male companion. Tracking the play right back to its prenatal embryo helps one to demystify the text. This approach does not simplify the play but rather simplifies the core meaning.

Pinter’s brief encounter with Mr Crisp left an enduring impression – “I went into a room one day and saw a couple of people in it. This Stuck with me for some time afterwards, and I felt that the only way I could give it expression and get it off my mind was dramatically” (Hinchliffe 40). But what was so extraordinary about the scene that required mental unpacking? Dukore matter-of-factly writes, “The Room begins with a dramatisation of Pinter’s chance encounter at a party in London” (26). It is simply left at that. However, Billington provides a hint, even if unintentionally, as to why the scene was so arresting. He explains, “It was, in fact, Quentin Crisp, a flamboyant, henna-haired sexual outsider immortalised in television’s The Naked Civil Servant, who unwittingly inspired Pinter’s first play, The Room” (66). Crisp was presumably a well-known character in London at that time and most certainly in the Chelsea area where he lived for some twenty years. He stood out for several reasons. As Billington notes, Crisp’s hair was dyed an artificial red colour. This had been Crisp’s custom since at least the late 1930s – “When war [WWII] was declared I went out and bought two pounds of henna” (Crisp 107). Additionally, Crisp recounts in his memoir that he wasn’t “merely a self-confessed homosexual but a self-evident one. That is to say I put my case not only before the people who knew me but also before strangers” (5; emphasis added). As a result, Crisp frequently suffered verbal and often physical attacks in public as recounted in his memoir. Nevertheless, Billington and others failed to discern any connection between Crisp’s life, a brief snapshot of which inspired Pinter’s play, and the main theme of The Room, which examines the sometimes-overwhelming menace posed by the outside world. Billington dismisses the connection as follows.

“Needless to say, the finished play has nothing to do with Quentin Crisp and his chum, but it capitalises on that same arresting image Pinter glimpsed in the Chelsea house and invests it with theatrical tension.”

(Billington 67; emphasis added)

The theatrical tension is primarily menace. Moreover, the ‘arresting image’ is actually the source of that tension. Pinter was most likely intrigued by the open-door policy of an unashamedly flamboyant homosexual who had, despite all appearances of ease, so much to fear from strangers. One brief anecdote encapsulates Crisp’s modus operandi for dealing with the world. In England, Quentin Crisp’s name was listed in the public telephone directory. He had, at times, even invited those who called on the telephone to subsequently visit his room in Chelsea. This practice initially arose from Crisp’s sincere disappointment at the absence of “confederacy among homosexuals” (112) during that conservative historical era. Yet he also admits – “I realized that I was placing myself in some danger” (112). Crisp would later joke about some of the nastier telephone calls on the Letterman show– “They ring me up threatening to kill me – I say do you want an appointment” (YouTube). It was Crisp’s own perception that he could not possibly hide his difference combined with his understandable insistence on still living his life that led to his amplified vulnerability. His own bedsit room was not a secure fortress but only because he made a conscious decision not to make it so. This is proven by his indiscriminate acceptance of either party guests like Pinter or those who may have intended to kill him, like his mystery callers.

Crisp’s life experiences, as detailed in The Naked Civil Servant, make the menace of the outside world incredibly tangible. Like in Pinter’s play, one comes to appreciate that there is always a level of threat, even though the source is often obscure. Dukore explains this quite well: “While menace may take the shape of particular characters, it is usually unspecified or unexplained – therefore, more ominous” (24). To create the play, Pinter took the ‘arresting image’ of the two men in the room and first conventionalised it by making them into a heterosexual, married couple. He then took the lead character’s reaction to menace and inverted it; Rose practically barricades herself in her room as part of her ongoing delusion that she can protect herself from threats, but Crisp understood that to avoid the threat meant to avoid life itself. Pinter begins by depicting a familiar, homely environment and even propagates, at first, the illusion that a brick wall or a wooden door will protect the fragile Rose. However, as the story unfolds, one gains an understanding of the psychology of fear. Real dangers automatically inspire fear but so does one’s perception of the world, which may be wholly accurate or sadly askew. What’s more, sometimes a threat that is perceived to be external is already nestled in the home but remains somehow invisible. Take for example Bert’s violence, which curiously leads to Rose’s blindness. Pinter takes an ‘arresting image’ and cleverly manipulates it into a familiar scene that ultimately implodes in unexpected violence. The benign, everyday scene eventually frightens an audience by exposing the hidden threat.

At one level, The Room is a metaphor for one’s attitude to life. For Rose, the room means her life has a degree of security – “This is a good room … you can come home, you’re all right … You stand a chance” (Pinter 95). This echoes Crisp’s sentiments on becoming independent – “my ecstasy at moving into a room of my own. Once I had achieved this I was happy” (48). Crisp’s phrasing reminds one of Virginia Woolf’s essay entitled “A Room of One’s Own” in which she describes the most basic necessities of artistic/personal expression. Quentin Crisp and Virginia Woolf saw a room as an essential starting point for real independence, but one cannot say the same about Rose. For Rose, the goal is safety alone – if she makes her life so small and inoffensive, practically invisible, then things will be manageable. The long-term repercussions of such an attitude become apparent when Mr and Mrs Sands ask the otherwise innocuous question about the location of Mr Kidd’s room. The landlord lives in the same house so directing them to his room shouldn’t be difficult for Rose, yet she can’t. Her interactions with others have become so superficial and curtailed that she doesn’t even know the other tenants in her building or their rooms. Rose’s world has shrunk not just to the area of a district or the length of a street but to the confines of a room.

Rose: “We’re very quiet. We keep ourselves to ourselves. I never interfere. I mean, why should I? We’ve got our room. We don’t bother anyone else. That’s the way it should be.”

(Pinter 105)

As Hinchliffe observes – “Pinter’s plays are simply about people bothering people who want to keep to themselves” (43). What intrigues one about Rose is her hidden motivation for such a reclusive life. Dukore states that “In the early plays [of Pinter,] menace lurks outside, but it also has psychological roots” (24). It is possible to distinguish between Rose’s headline fears about external threats and earlier, more subtle hints of a pre-existing, domestic problem. Rose’s fear crescendos with Riley’s visit and his plea for her to come home, but she’s also afraid that the young Mr and Mrs Sands may take her treasured room, and she’s scared for Bert since he must drive on a treacherously icy night. Subtler hints of Rose’s psychological state appear in her assertive proclamations about her abode and daily habits. She tells the Sands, “I never go out at night. We stay in” (Pinter 103). The noticeable shift from I to We reveals that she never goes out at night since we know he sometimes works at night. Bert can trust her. There is also considerable menace in Bert’s initial silence when assessed in the context of his later violence. Is this why she chatters at him while busily waiting on him hand and foot? How should an actress playing Rose deliver the line “I look after you, don’t I, Bert?” (95). Is she a nervous, domestic handmaiden to a violent husband? The root of Rose’s generalised fear of the world could be a fear of the man she loves, lives with, or merely serves. In Rose’s eyes, Bert is either a heroic, manly protector or a choleric, sometimes violent oppressor. Within the environment portrayed by Pinter, – “One can rely upon nothing. What is apparently secure is not secure. A haven does not protect” (Dukore 25). One can only speculate on the origin of Rose’s fears, but they certainly exist prior to the visits by Riley and the Sands. Rose’s instinctual response to her environment, which is a visible manifestation of those fears, is her downfall. Ruby Cohn gives a fascinating insight into the rooms depicted in Pinter’s plays – “At the opening curtain, these rooms look naturalistic, meaning no more than the eye can contain. But by the end of each play, they become sealed containers, virtual coffins” (56). Rose is being buried alive, but she is an unknowing even though avid participant in the process.

An analysis of Rose’s interactions with the other characters reveals her fear but not much else of any significance. Much like following footsteps in the sand, they seem to lead somewhere but the trail soon dissolves to nothingness. One tactic is to depart from Pinter’s play and return to the play’s genesis – but from Mr Crisp’s perspective.

Quentin Crisp: “When I had lived in my room for some fifteen years, and I was feeding a starving outcast, we were called on by a small deputation of guests from a party going on elsewhere in the house. They brought glasses of sherry. As the rest of us sipped and chatted, one visitor sat silent. Through thick horn-rimmed spectacles he gave the scene a panoramic stare. His name was Mr Pinter. Later he confessed that this was the moment when he first felt that he might write a play.”

(Crisp 111)

Crisp’s description of the starving outcast whom he was feeding suggests a benign figure in need of some charity instead of a menacing, hulking brute. In contrast, the inscrutably silent Mr Pinter becomes the Bert character in the scene: the unfathomable and subsequently menacing figure. Crisp was acutely sensitive to the dangers of silence because it was, to him, the most familiar mask of menace. Writing about male attackers he encountered in London, Crisp recounts – “While I talked, they remained silent if only to enjoy the luxury of hearing themselves called ‘Sir’. But even I could not prolong a filibuster indefinitely” (42). As soon as Crisp’s subservient chatter would cease, “they started to work themselves into a frenzy by shouting, swearing and laughing—a device that I [Crisp] am told is standard procedure in bayonet practice” (42). He would then be slapped or punched. Pinter obviously posed no threat to Crisp, but he was nevertheless an all-too-common figure in Crisp’s life: one who looked on in judgment. Crisp’s openness and hospitality made such figures a constant reality. In the play, Bert says not a single word to Riley, except his derogatory descriptor of “lice!” before he kicks the man unconscious, or possibly to death. Rose had similar feelings when she described Riley to Mr Kidd, “I get these creeps come in, smelling up my room” (Pinter 113). The same relentless fear of outsiders inhabits Rose and Quentin Crisp, but they handle it in their individual, contrasting ways. Both characters fuss and chatter but are, at all times, alert to the hidden menace.

Did Pinter see beneath the busyness of Crisp’s entertaining manner of amusing his guests to the fact that it was sadly indivisible from a lifelong tactic of subtle defensiveness and diversion? Did the playwright intuit the covert layer of menace that inevitably haunted Crisp’s life? In an interview with Charlie Rose, Pinter simply refers to the memory of the party and further states that he was surprised by the violence of the play as it was not pre-planned. However, the tension in The Room is clearly the basis for the eventual violence. A sense of menace may pre-exist in a domestic setting, or it may be activated only upon the arrival of an outsider. Pinter bases his play on the outsider’s perspective: the one who is invited in and alters the dynamic. What organically manifests itself in The Room is what Pinter intuitively garnered from his snapshot into Crisp’s life. Maybe Pinter grasped it subconsciously, but he would certainly have understood that Crisp’s lifestyle was a lightning rod for criticism in that era.

Billington quotes a rare interpretative insight from Pinter that helps one’s understanding of the play. Pinter said: “I’ve always seen Riley … as a messenger, a potential saviour who is trying to release Rose from the imprisonment of the room and the restrictions of her life with Bert” (69). Rose fails to grasp this opportunity because she is unwilling to acknowledge her past. Dukore explains how this situation adds to the play’s effect – “it is not the characters’ background that is of major dramatic concern but their avoidance of revealing it” (27). Again, this is where Rose is an inversion of Crisp since she cannot express herself openly, especially not anything about her history. According to Billington, Pinter “is writing about the loss of identity that comes through the pincer-like claims of past and present” (69). Rose is hiding from the present-day world while she simultaneously hides her past from Bert. In Cohn’s opinion, “The essence of the Pinter victim is his final sputtering helplessness” (68). This is true of Rose, especially given her eventual blindness, but it is also perversely true of Crisp. Therefore, Pinter’s core message is not simply about the merits of openness, especially to potential saviours.

The foundation stone of Rose’s characterization is Quentin Crisp. Pinter takes a flamboyant, flame-haired homosexual and turns him into a docile, fearful housewife. Yet the playwright importantly retains Crisp’s chattiness plus the true essence of his vulnerability. Crisp could only be himself and had to suffer the world’s many grievances being hurled against such an identity, or else hide. Menace constantly lurked within the most mundane of everyday interactions. Rose is Crisp’s logical alter ego: the one who hides, cowers, shrinks, and is eventually rendered helpless. For both of them, the outsider symbolises the saviour or the annihilator, but there is no way of predetermining which one it will be. Upon repeated requests from Riley to “come home” (Pinter 114), Rose begins to open up. She suddenly confides that “The day is a hump. I never go out” (115). This evokes a sense of Rose’s painful imprisonment, so Riley is indeed the potential saviour as explained by Pinter. Unfortunately, at that moment, Bert returns, and the scene ends in horror and violence. The play depicts an extreme situation where a pathologically reclusive figure is robbed of the last vestige of independence: her sight. Rose is a hostage to the menacingly silent Bert. However, he is just a typical representative of British society in the 1950s: a society that feared sex, foreigners, homosexuals, and anyone different. At its core, The Room is about the menace of the public mob and the resulting pressure to be normal. Pinter takes the example of Crisp, an unbendingly obstinate outsider, and transforms him into Rose, a meek, reclusive woman, and yet both of them fail.

Pinter highlights without actually approving the safety of the middle ground of conventionality. The creation of Rose merely facilitates the playwright’s exercise of wholly inverting a character and watching them fail for the same yet somehow different reasons. Rose is utterly neurotic about propriety and her life contracts into a single room’s space of misery due to her guardianship of this societal ideal. Her past is somehow unconventional, possibly shameful, and her resulting excessive caution is her demise. Crisp, in contrast, disregards caution in a society that cannot accept him and thus he pays an equally cruel price. The violence that erupts in The Room is a predictable expression of the growing menace. The playwright is expressing, in quite a coded play, a clear condemnation of the straitjacketed society in which he lived. Rose is simply a more sympathetic figure to communicate the message than the outlandish Mr Crisp.  

Neither the fictional Rose nor the real-life Crisp could ultimately process the level of menace that infiltrated their lives. Though Crisp was no prisoner to his room and readily defied conventions, he admits – “It would have been impossible to get through the kind of life that I have known without accumulating a vast unused stockpile of rage” (218). In later life, he dreamed of having “revenge on the world” (218), but he had to reabsorb his anger in polite quietness, and this proved a heavy burden.

“By constituting myself the one among the many I had provoked the worst behaviour in others. With this I felt compelled to deal politely. This wrought no change whatever in the character of my enemies but caused the total disintegration of my own.”

(Crisp 221)

Some knowledge of Crisp’s life story sheds light on Rose’s dilemma. They stand at opposite ends of a spectrum, both at the extreme, but their fates are nonetheless similar. Crisp made a conscious choice to meet the world head-on, whereas Rose hides her past, compromises her present and turns her back on the world. Crisp evidently understood this dilemma and the ‘right’ choice because he recounts an illustrative tale of two New York brothers who lived quite reclusively in an apartment. In fact, “To keep out intruders every inch of this labyrinth was mined with booby traps” (Crisp 143). When the healthy, mobile brother died in one of his own traps, then the bed-bound, second brother subsequently starved to death. Their bodies were discovered months later. Crisp sums up the problem of self-imposed solitude as follows – “The place where no harm can come is the place where nothing at all can come” (221). This is the essential message of Pinter’s The Room but with the discomfiting proviso that society must also accept you for the experience to be tolerable. There is always a hidden layer of menace: the silent, unpredictable onlooker.

Works Cited

Billington, Michael. The Life and Work of Harold Pinter. Faber and Faber, 1997.  

Cohn, Ruby. “The World of Harold Pinter.” The Tulane Drama Review, vol. 6, no. 3, 1962, pp. 55–68. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1124935.

Crisp, Quentin. The Naked Civil Servant. Flamingo, 1985.  

Dukore, Bernard F. Harold Pinter. Macmillan, 1985.  

“Harold Pinter interview (2001).” YouTube, uploaded by Manufacturing Intellect, 17 September 2017, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVchqMXobVQ. 

Hinchliffe, Arnold P. Harold Pinter. The Macmillan Press, 1976.  

Pinter, Harold. The Room. Samuel French, 1960.  

“Quentin Crisp Collection on Letterman, 1982-83.” YouTube, uploaded by Don Giller, 11 March 2018, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaXPFuIXpk4.