SOURCE: “Harold Pinter: A Retrospect,” in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter, 1978, pp. 21-28.

In the following essay, Thomson provides an overview of Pinter’s plays, declaring the earlier ones authentic and superior to the later, which he finds formula-driven and lacking in dramatic drive.

With the publication, in 1978, of Poems and Prose 1949-1977, Pinter has vigorously reminded us that he is not merely a playwright. He may even, in a mood of declared disaffection, be saying that he is no longer a playwright. His first performed play, in 1957, was The Room, and the sixties was his triumphant decade. Something about the seventies—the declared violence on the one hand, a personal anguish on the other—has made his recent plays as secret and reclusive as he is himself. The production at the National Theatre of his latest play, Betrayal, scheduled for the autumn of 1978, may well be decisive...