1 for the Road, considered Harold Pinter's "statement nearly the human rights abuses of totalitarian governments", was inspired, co-ordinate to Antonia Fraser, by reading on May nineteen, 1983, Jacobo Timerman'southPrisoner Without a Name, Jail cell Without a Number, a book about torture on Argentina'southward military dictatorship; later, on Jan 1984, he got to write it afterward an argument with ii Turkish girls at a family altogether political party on the bailiwick of torture.

The play takes place in "A room" in a house during the grade of i day ("Morning time", "Afternoon", and "Dark"), but the location of the room is unspecified. In this play the actual physical violence takes place off stage; Pinter indirectly dramatizes such terror and violence through verbal and non-verbal allusions to off-phase acts of repeated rape of Gila, physical mutilation of Victor, and the ultimate murder of their son, Nicky. The effects of the violence that takes identify off phase are, all the same, portrayed verbally and non-verbally on stage. The employ of some common English colloquial expressions (e.g., the titular "I for the Route" repeated past Nicolas regarding having another potable) implies that the activenesscould take place in Great Britain or America, or some other English-speaking country among "civilised" people.

Presented by:
The Commissariat of Enlightenment

Directed by:
Todd Smith

Bandage:
Gildart Jackson – Nicholas
Joseph Gilbert – Victor
Milo Simon-Lucero – Nicky
Sandi Gardiner – Gila

November 3 – Nov xi
Atwater Village Theatre
3269 Casitas Ave, Los Angeles, California 90039

Synopsis:

Victor and his wife Gila, who accept obviously been tortured, equally their "clothes" are "torn" and they are "bruised", and their seven-year-old son, Nicky, are imprisoned in separate rooms of a business firm past a totalitarian regime represented past an officer named Nicolas. Though in command locally—"I can do admittedly anything I similar" —he is not the final arbiter of power, since he refers to outside sources to validate his actions: "Do you know the man who runs this country?"; "God speaks through me."But the play reveals that Nicolas is insecure and that he overcompensates by aggressive gestures and words, threatening both Victor and Gila with a peculiar gesture, waving and jabbing his "large finger" and his "little finger […] both at the same time" before their eyes;while he tries to converse with Victor as if they wereboth "civilised" men, he stresses gratuitously that "Everyone respects me here" and invents depraved fantasies of having sex with a menstruating Gila, even ruminating perversely that she has "fallen in dearest" with him.

When Nicolas confronts Gila, he refers to sexual torture of her that has taken and will continue to take place off phase: "Have they [my soldiers] been raping you? […] How many times? How many times have you been raped?Break. How many times?" […] "How many times have you been raped?"

Though Nicolas chats in an ostensibly-innocuous fashion with Victor's and Gila's seven-year-old son Nicky about whether the child "Would like to be a soldier" when he grows upward,he bullies fifty-fifty the little boy: "You similar soldiers. Good. Merely you spat at my soldiers and you kicked them. You attacked them." After Nicky says, "I didn't like those soldiers", Nicolas replies menacingly: "They don't like y'all either, my darling."

Victor's and Gila's specific "offences" (if there are any) go unnamed. Nicolas accuses Gila of mentioning her father when she responds to a question about where she met her married man by saying that she met him in "a room", in her "father'southward room"; Nicolas exaggerates this mere mention as if she were "to defame, to debase, the memory of [her dead] father"—"a wonderful man […] a homo of laurels" whom he claims to accept "loved […] equally if he were my own father".

In his final substitution with Victor, Nicolas' use of the past tense signifies that the soldiers take killed Nicky and portends his parents' similarly terrifying fate at their hands: "Your son. I wouldn't worry about him. Hewas a picayune prick" (italics added), leading to Pinter'south last stage directions, equally Victor "straightens and stares at" Nicolas, followed by "Silence" and "Blackout."

Synopis excerpt via Wikipedia

Joseph Gilbert as Victor in "I for the Route"

Joseph Gilbert every bit Victor in "Ane for the Road"

Gildart Jackson as Nicholas in "One for the Road"

Gildart Jackson every bit Nicholas in "Ane for the Road"