Harold Pinter's The Room is a tragicomic play about an anxious woman whose humble life is disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious messenger whose presence portends death. Written in 1957, The Room was Pinter's first play.
Living in a single-room apartment in a large rooming house, Rose Hudd, a sixty-year-old woman, dotes on her taciturn husband, Bert. She talks about her wish to avoid the cold and dark outside. When Bert leaves to drive his van for work, a young couple arrives hoping to speak to the landlord about a room for rent. Rose is concerned to learn from the couple that a man in the unlit basement told them her room was going vacant. Rose talks with the landlord, who explains that a man has been waiting all weekend in the basement to speak with her. The man, who is blind and Black, comes to the room and tells Rose that her father says it is time to come home. Rose initially rejects his message, but soon she touches the man's face and head as though she is blind herself. Bert comes home and attacks the man, who lies inert after Bert kicks his head against the stove. The play ends with Rose realizing she can no longer see.
Exploring themes of alienation, communication breakdown, and uncertainty, The Room juxtaposes the mundanity of social graces with a growing sense of fear and bewilderment. Some critics refer to this combination of elements—also present in other Pinter plays written around the same time—as a "comedy of menace." Left open to interpretation, The Room makes associations between the blind visitor and the Grim Reaper, suggesting he may be there to bring Rose into the afterlife; in going blind herself, Rose may be taking the man's place as an emissary from the underworld.
According to the legend surrounding the composition of The Room, Pinter wrote the play over several days in 1957 at the request of his friend Henry Woolf, who played the landlord, Mr. Kidd, in the first amateur stagings in 1957 and 1958. A Pinter-directed production was professionally staged in 1960 as part of a double bill with The Dumb Waiter. In 1987, Robert Altman directed TV-movie adaptations of The Room and The Dumb Waiter as halves of a two-part special called Basements.
