SOURCE: “A Stink of Pinter,” in New Statesman, Vol. 69, No. 1787, June 11, 1965, p. 928.

In the following review, Bryden praises Pinter's skill as a playwright but wonders about the depth of his concerns, or of his accomplishment.

With a click of lights, a room jumps into being. An echoing grey chamber, reminiscent of that lichened brain-dungeon where, last year at the Aldwych, Beckett's Hamm and Clov railed against the dying of the light in Endgame. Only these walls are bare as chalk, these furnishings a blackened, broken-backed three-piece and dresser, remnants of some Seven Sisters Road auction. They lessen the scene's bareness no more than the chewed stools and duckboards in one of the larger animal-houses at the Zoo. An old man in flat cap and dirty tennis shoes is quarrelling with a younger over the newspaper. He wants to snip out an advertisement for cut-price Navy surplus flannel vests...