A play by Harold Pinter, British playwright and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. It’s a brilliant and strange mind game from the unconventional playwright that blends the absurd, humour and a sense of the tragedy of existence.
It’s the first day of summer and everything seems to be going well. But an intruder wasp slips into the jam jar. It has to be killed…
This beautiful day begins with a murder.
An anguish, first dull, then more and more violent, assails Edouard. A little pain in his eye, of no consequence, seems to trigger it. But no, it’s not this little sore that’s worrying him, it’s the presence of a match seller who’s been standing behind the back gate of his garden for weeks. But who is he? Why is he there? Why is he selling matches on a road that no one ever uses?
Harold Pinter uses a banal, everyday situation to create a singular universe that is both comic and strange. Edouard’s logic breaks down in the face of the old man’s silence. There’s no way out for this intellectual, locked up in his closed, padlocked world.
Eligible for the Culture Pass.
