SOURCE: “Harold Pinter—Past and Present,” in Kansas Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring, 1971, pp. 89-99.

In the following essay, Gordon traces the manner in which Pinter moves from the analytic to the lyrical form of language in his plays.

In the remarkably short time between 1957 and 1965 Harold Pinter established himself as the most gifted playwright in England. Prominent not only as the author of nearly a dozen plays, including The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, and The Homecoming, he is also an accomplished poet, TV and film scriptwriter (The Servant, The Quiller Memorandum, Accident), actor, and director. It is therefore of interest that in his prolific career, a four-year silence separated his last stage play, The Homecoming, from the most recent Silence and Landscape (1969).

Pinter has created an idiom peculiarly his own, often miscalled “theatre of the absurd” or “drama of menace,” labels which decribe the so-called forces of terror...