Night (sketch)

Night (sketch)

Night is a dramatic sketch by the English playwright Harold Pinter, presented as one of eight short dramatic works about marriage in the program Mixed Doubles: An Entertainment on Marriage at the Comedy Theatre, London, on April 9, 1969; directed by Alexander Doré, this production included Nigel Stock as the Man and Pinter's first wife, Vivien Merchant, as the Woman (54). It replaced another sketch performed previously in the program We Who Are About To... at the Hampstead Theatre Club on February 6, 1969; each of the original eight sketches about marriage also featured two characters.

This dramatic sketch is a duologue between a married couple "in their forties" (54). As they "sit with coffee" (54), they reminisce about when they first met and fell in love during their youth. The tone of the sketch is both gently comic and wistful, as Pinter exposes some present emotional disjunction between the characters through their dialogue about their past, which they remember differently. They have at least one child, as the wife thinks she "heard a child crying, a child, waking up" in their house, whereas the husband responds, "There was no sound. The house is silent" (57).

Night was among the sketches included in Sketches II, the second of a two-part programme, produced on 8 (I) and 11 February 2002 (II), at the Lyttelton Theatre, Royal National Theatre, in London ("Sketches", haroldpinter.org).

It was also produced again as part of Pinter's People, at the Haymarket Theatre, in London, running for four weeks beginning on 30 January 2007.

It was first published with Pinter's two one-act plays Landscape (1968) and Silence (1969), by Methuen, in London, in 1969, and by Grove Press, in New York, in 1970.