Moonlight

'A dark, elegiac play, studded with brutally and swaggeringly funny jokes.'
Sunday Times

'A deeply poignant, raffishly comic, emotion-charged study of the gulf between parents and children and the anguish of approaching death... Beckett, the poet of terminal stages, inevitably comes to mind. What instantly moves one is Pinter's image of a man confronting death in a spirit of rage, fear and uncertainty... The piss-taking Pinter humour and the undercutting of verbal pretence are all there. But what makes this an extraordinary play is that Pinter both corrals his familiar themes - the subjectiveness of memory, the unknowability of one's lifelong partner, the gap between the certain present and the uncertain past - and extends his territory. He shows, with unflinching candour, that in an age shorn of systems and beliefs we face "death's dateless date" in a state of mortal terror.'
Guardian

'Pinter has written few more fascinating plays.'
The Times

First staged at the Almeida Theatre, London, in September 1993, Moonlight was revived at the Donmar, London, in April 2011.


'The foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century.'
Swedish Academy citation on awarding Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2005

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.