Composition History
Pinter wrote The Room over two or four days in 1957, depending on the account, at the suggestion of his friend Henry Woolf for his production as part of a postgraduate program in directing at the University of Bristol, Bristol, England.
In their published interviews, Pinter and Woolf vary in describing how many days Pinter took to write The Room. According to Billington, in his official biography Harold Pinter, Woolf asked Pinter to write the play in a letter that Pinter received in the autumn of 1956, when he "was newly married" to actress Vivien Merchant "and in the middle of a season at Torquay"; " replied that he couldn't possibly deliver anything in under six months. In fact, the play arrived in the post very shortly. It was written over four afternoons and late nights while Pinter was playing in Rattigan's Separate Tables at the Pavilion Theatre, Torquay, in November 1956. The Room, as the play was called, was eventually staged by the Bristol Drama Department in May 1957 in a converted squash-court and in a production by Woolf himself" (66–67).
According to Woolf, Pinter "said he couldn't write a play in under six months. He wrote it in two days, he says four days, no it wasn't it was two days."
Read more about this topic: The Room (play)
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