The bourgeois English couple in The Lover.
The Lover is set in the tastefully furnished living room of a detached house near Windsor in south-east England. The house is in the heart of what is known as the ‘Home Counties’, a term used to locate a ring of wealthy towns and villages that surround London, from which many home owners commute into the city to work. At the time that Pinter wrote the play, these commuters would almost universally have been the men in the household, and in Sarah and Richard in The Lover he paints a picture of a typical such bourgeois English couple and their suburban life. At one stage Richard refers rather wistfully to their happy and secure social existence, for example, where they attend the local Hunt Ball, and he is proud to be seen out with Sarah at dinner or the theatre. Pinter also includes several other quintessentially English details that underline the cliché he’s portraying; for example Richard’s specific reference to the hollyhocks in the garden that suggest his preoccupation and pride in their garden – gardening being a classic English pastime. Or their using the pet euphemism “teatime” for their meeting under the table for sex, as well as Sarah’s innuendo when she says suggestively that she gives her other lovers “strawberries, with cream.”

Of course Pinter establishes the perfectly conventional nature of their lives as the foil for the surprising rebellion they enact in their sexual games. Somewhat unusually Pinter provided background on his characters in a talk to the cast at the start of rehearsals for the first production, which the assistant director recorded in his diary at the time. According to Pinter, Sarah and Richard “attend the Hunt ball, play golf. Both of them are sophisticated in the fullest sense of the word. They are socially admired – a thoroughly nice couple. Their obsessional private life is what gives the kick to the routine of their lives…Whilst it is doubtful if either of them were virgins before marriage, there was no great sexual indulgence…The fantasy life started as a joke – he initiated the role play one afternoon dressing up as a workman and surprising her, to which she responded with ‘great sexual excitement’.

Pinter’s portrait of the sexual roles that Sarah and Richard play and their respective expectations of them is not just a comic satire of suburban mores however; it becomes a deeper and darker exploration of sexual attitudes and assumptions. In a rather orthodox reading, they both display a duality in their natures, where on the surface they obey the rules of polite society, but they are compelled to find ways to express coarser impulses and behaviour by adopting their alternative identities. However, their respective understanding of these erotic impulses and their expression differs. Richard believes that the game they are playing is nothing more than a license for sexual release, an enactment of a male stereotype that allows his lust to take advantage of a completely compliant female in the form of a whore, with no strings attached, so to speak. He is happy to keep the lustful Max and civilised Robert very separate; in fact his lust is even more than satiated, so that he struggles to keep up the pace that Sarah seems to want.

Whereas for Sarah the sex they have in ther role playing is not disconnected from herself or her emotional relationship with her husband. This lack of division within her sense of self is signalled by the fact that unlike him she does not adopt a different name in the roles that she plays. More importantly we understand that she is more fulfilled by the sex they enjoy, telling him that she seems “to have a far richer time than” he does. For her, “things are beautifully balanced”, even to the point that she believes that they could not have “what we have” without their adopting the roles of lovers as well as being a married couple. The role playing is essential for her to simultaneously satisfy her desires and sustain the marriage, to the point that she implores Richard not to put an end to their arrangement: “you’ve always appreciated…how much these afternoons…mean.” She understands that for her as a woman it is only by throwing off the constraints of her bourgeois identity that she can be the fullest version of herself in a more equal marriage.