Moonlight is a one-act play by Harold Pinter which was first produced in September 1993 at the Almeida Theater in London. The play is divided into seventeen different sections which take place in three “playing areas” of the set: the well-furnished bedroom of Andy, the much more threadbare and rundown counterpart belonging to Fred and a sort of common area belonging to Bridget, but which the other characters pass through.
The Pinter trademark of ambiguity, mystery, unanswered questions and unsolved riddles are every bit as present here as in his full-length plays. The common ground to which Bridget seems to belong because she has no bedroom of her like Andy and Fred indicates that her status may be less than corporeal: she might be dead, she might be spectral spirit; she could even be just a memory. Pinter gives audiences just enough information to allow them to reach their own interpretation, but not enough to ever allow any argument over interpretation to ever be definitively answered.
One very popular interpretation of the overall effect and meaning of Moonlight, however, is that it represents Pinter’s attempt to not just dramatize death, but to replicate the very experience of death on stage. This interpretation stems in large part from the admission that Pinter was stimulated to write the play as a result of circumstance not allowing him to properly mourn the death of his mother which occurred just slightly less than a year before the play’s premiere.
