The Collection is a 1961 play by Harold Pinter featuring two couples, James and Stella and Harry and Bill.
It is a comedy laced with typically "Pinteresque" ambiguity and "implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses" (Oxford English Dictionary).
The Collection takes place on a divided stage, shared by a house in London's Belgravia, and a flat in Chelsea, with another space between them where telephone calls take place; according to Pinter's stage description, the "three areas" comprise "two peninsulas and a promontory" (Three Plays [43]).
Following some apparently trivial conversation between Stella, another dress designer, and James (Horne), her husband and business partner, that occurs in his flat, James has left it to call on Bill at Harry's house, revealing that he was the anonymous caller and is the unexpected visitor.
Lying.James's obsession to meet the man who has purportedly cuckolded him––suggesting archetypal symbolic significance in Pinter's choice of his surname (Horne)–– and to confront him with "the truth" culminates in a "mock duel" with household knives, in which Bill is scarred.
Bill confirms that nothing happened, and Harry viciously chastises him, calling him a "slum slug" with a "slum mind" and claiming that he "confirms stupid sordid little stories just to amuse himself, while everyone else has to run round in circles to get to the root of the matter and smooth the whole thing out".