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Esslin is extremely helpful on Pinter's use of language as dramatic action. In his dialogue, words are often punitive; those jagged milk bottles Pinter had to face as a boy are transferred into a fierce power struggle Of words. The losers in his plays frequently become addled in speech, or utterly speechless. They have symbolically lost control over their immediate terrain, or their future destiny.
Pinter has always been acutely aware of the language beneath language. He knows that the unsaid word sometimes thunders. He elevated the pause to a line of dialogue. As a playwright, Pinter has taken the age-old dramatic confrontation of appearance v. reality into the area of language itself.
What is lacking in Esslin's book is an adequate treatment of Pinter's humor, the who's-on-first? type of verbal vaudeville, the teasing that frequently precedes the terror. Esslin also scant the intense domestic patterns in Pinter's two-and three-person plays, which contribute to both the solace and the savagery of his dramas.
Esslin grades Pinter as a profound and durable playwright, and in this he is, of course, forced to play the critic', absurd game of trying to make up posterity's mind. What can be said with assurance is that when anyone uses the word Pinteresque—a word Pinter hates —it is because there is no adequate substitute. That ought to be triumph enough for an artist just turned 40.
T.E. Kalem