One-act play by Harold Pinter, playwright of the theater of the absurd, first performed in late January 1960. The play depicts the life of a paranoid woman in her sixties, living in a boarding house with her husband, yet she never leaves her room of the derelict boarding house. Eventually, a ghost from her past, a blind black man named Riley, finds her and gives her a message--"Your father wants you to come home." After a short conversation, Rose's husband returns home, and beats Riley to death.
The play portrays how, though we may escape our past, it still comes back to haunt us. Yet, even then, the past can be protected from, but not eliminated.