three prisoners which fascinatingly suggest that the torturer is tortured himself, despite his smooth manner. He knocks back the whisky with alcoholic urgency, and, in a couple of moments when we see him alone, seems deeply perturbed. There is a sense of terrible loneliness, of a man who serves the state because he has nothing, and no one, else. His victims are his only friends. "Who would you rather be? You or me?" Nicolas asks the husband. It is the achievement of both Pinter the writer, and Pinter the actor, that we know, in the very core of our being, that there could be nothing worse than to be Nicolas. As well as offering a hideously persuasive account of the mechanics of psychological torture and the apparatus of state repression, One for the Road takes you right into the heart of one man's moral wasteland. Charles Spencer Harold Pinter Photographer - John Haynes The Guardian - Wednesday 4th July 2001 One For The Road, New Ambassadors Theatre Pinter the actor's muscular authority Pinter the writer is much lauded. Less is written about Pinter the actor. And watching him play the sadistic interrogator in his own short, shocking play about political oppression you realise he could have been a contender: mixing muscular authority with flickering irony he would have made a natural classical heavy. A pity, you feel, he never gave his Richard the Third. That quality of lethal surprise is necessary in One for the Road. In four brisk scenes