One for the Road is an overtly political one-act play by Harold Pinter, which premiered at Lyric Studio, Hammersmith, in London, on 13 March 1984, and was first published by Methuen in 1984.

One for the Road, considered Pinter's "statement about the human rights abuses of totalitarian governments",[1] was inspired, according to Antonia Fraser,[2] by reading on May 19, 1983, Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, a book about torture on Argentina's military dictatorship; later, in January 1984, he got to write it after an argument with two Turkish girls at a family birthday party on the subject of torture.

The year following the publication, Pinter would visit Turkey with Arthur Miller "to investigate allegations of the torture and persecution of Turkish writers";[3] as he explains further in his interview with Nicholas Hern, "A Play and Its Politics", conducted in February 1985 and published in 1985 in the revised and reset Eyre Methuen hardback[4] and in 1986 in the Grove Evergreen paperback[5] and illustrated with production photographs taken at the premiere by Ivan Kyncl, torture of political prisoners in countries like Turkey "is systematic".

The furniture in the room, a "desk" and a "machine" used as a telephone intercom, and the bars on the windows, as illustrated by the premiere production photographs, suggests that the room in a domestic house has been converted into an office and that the house functions as a prison[8] The use of some common English colloquial expressions (e.g., the titular "One for the Road" repeated by Nicolas regarding having another drink) implies that the action could take place in Great Britain or America, or another English-speaking country among "civilised" people.

[9] Victor and his wife Gila, who have obviously been tortured, as their "clothes" are "torn" and they are "bruised",[10] and their seven-year-old son, Nicky, are imprisoned in separate rooms of a house by a totalitarian or democratic regime represented by an officer named Nicolas.

"[13] But the play reveals that Nicolas is insecure and that he overcompensates by aggressive gestures and words, threatening both Victor and Gila with a peculiar gesture, waving and jabbing his "big finger" and his "little finger […] both at the same time" before their eyes;[14] while he tries to converse with Victor as if they were both "civilised" men, he stresses gratuitously that "Everyone respects me here"[15] and invents depraved fantasies of having sex with a menstruating Gila,[16] even ruminating perversely that she has "fallen in love" with him.

[22] In his final exchange with Victor, Nicolas' use of the past tense signifies that the soldiers have killed Nicky and portends his parents' similarly terrifying fate at their hands: "Your son.

He was a little prick" (italics added),[23] leading to Pinter's final stage directions, as Victor "straightens and stares at" Nicolas, followed by "Silence" and "Blackout.