Night (sketch)

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Night is a dramatic sketch by the English playwright Harold Pinter, presented as one of eight short dramatic works about marriage in the program Mixed Doubles: An Entertainment on Marriage at the Comedy Theatre, London, on 9 April 1969; directed by Alexander Doré, this production included Nigel Stock as the Man and Pinter's first wife, Vivien Merchant, as the Woman (54).^[1] It replaced another sketch performed previously in the program We Who Are About To... at the Hampstead Theatre Club on 6 February 1969; each of the original eight sketches about marriage also featured two characters.^{[citation needed]}

This dramatic sketch is a duologue between a married couple "in their forties" (54). As they "sit with coffee" (54), they reminisce about when they first met and fell in love during their youth. The tone of the sketch is both gently comic and wistful, as Pinter exposes some present emotional disjunction between the characters through their dialogue about their past, which they remember differently. They have at least one child, as the wife thinks she "heard a child crying, […] a child, waking up" in their house, whereas the husband responds, "There was no sound. […] The house is silent" (57).