Postmemory, Testimony, Affect

Abstract

Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes (1996) combines features of his early memory plays and his overtly political dramas, such as One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), and Party Time (1991), as well as his sketches Precisely (1983) and The New World Order (1991), which he started writing after the mid-1980s. As in Landscape (1967), which marks the beginning of Pinter’s long and fruitful obsession with the subject of memory, the setting is a ground floor room in a country house, with a garden outside, where a woman — Rebecca, and a man, Devlin — talk about the past. It is the woman, again, who reminisces, while the man relentlessly and obsessively provokes the flood of memories with his questions. Yet, while in Pinter’s early memory plays the past is always frozen into monologic “mindscapes” through the language, stage images, and the behaviour of his characters, Ashes to Ashes expands this self-circulation, transforming the subjectivity of grief into a broader historical, and collective, context.