ABSTRACT
In Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes, Rebecca, hearing the wail of a police siren breaking the silence of a summer evening, declares that the sound leaves her “terribly upset…terribly insecure” (29-31). Her reaction will hardly surprise those familiar with the authoritarian police states Pinter dramatizes in the overtly political plays he has written since the mid-1980s: One for the Road, Mountain Language, Party Time, and The New World Order. In these works, such criminal acts as rape, murder, and torture are carried out by those entrusted to safeguard “law and order”; indeed, are carried out in the very name of the law. The siren provoking Rebecca’s anxiety, however, does not approach her, heralding imminent arrest and the kind of horrific sexual brutality to which the police subject Gila in One for the Road; rather, it recedes in the distance: “It just hit me so hard. You see…as the siren faded away in my ears I knew it was becoming louder and louder for somebody else” (29). What makes this moment so disturbing is the palpable loss Rebecca feels, as if her subjectivity were dissolving within the siren’s diminishing echo: “I hate it fading away. I hate it echoing away. I hate it leaving me. I hate losing it. I hate somebody else possessing it. I want it to be mine, all the time. It’s such a beautiful sound” (31). Rebecca’s (presumed) husband, Devlin, offers her the chilling consolation that “there’ll always be another one. There is one on its way to you now. Believe me. You’ll hear it again soon. Any minute…. So you can take comfort from that, at least. Can’t you? You’ll never be lonely again. You’ll never be without a police siren” (31-33).
