Setting
The play takes place in "A room" in a house during the course of one day ("Morning", "Afternoon", and "Night"), but the location of the room is unspecified. The furniture in the room, a "desk" and a "machine" used as a telephone intercom, and the bars on the windows, as illustrated by the premiere production photographs, suggests that the room in a domestic house has been converted into an office and that the house functions as a prison (30 ff.) The use of some common English colloquial expressions (e.g., the titular "One for the Road" repeated by Nicolas regarding having another drink) implies that the action could take place in Great Britain or America, or another English-speaking country among "civilised" people (31).
Read more about this topic: One For The Road (Harold Pinter Play)
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
“When I consider the clouds stretched in stupendous masses across the sky, frowning with darkness or glowing with downy light, or gilded with the rays of the setting sun, like the battlements of a city in the heavens, their grandeur appears thrown away on the meanness of my employment; the drapery is altogether too rich for such poor acting. I am hardly worthy to be a suburban dweller outside those walls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man’s will and his environment: in a word, of problem.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)