By far the most original, flexible, and challenging of the new dramatists of the late 1950s, Harold Pinter (b. 1930), was, like Weaker, the son of an East End Jewish tailor. All Pinter’s plays suggest a sure sense of the dramatic effect of pace, pausing, and timing.

They open up instead a world of seeming inconsequentiality, genital communication, dislocated relationships and undefined threats. Pinter’s first four plays were The Room, The Waiter, The Birthday Party (all written in 1957), and The Caretaker (written in 1959 and performed in the following year).

Betrayal, cleverly based on a series of retrogressions, deals, ostensibly realistically, with middle-class adultery in literary London. The Homecoming, first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1964, marks something of a turning-point in his career.

The Homecoming leaves a residual sense of sourness and negativity. Its most notable successors, Old Times (1971), No Man’s Land (1975), and Betrayal (1978), all extend its calculated uncertainty and its (now denitrified) hints of menace and odiousness. Since one for the Road (1984), Pinter’s plays have shifted away from developed representations of uncertainty towards a far terser and more overtly political drama. Both One for the Road and Mountain Language (1988) are insistently concerned with language and with acts of interrogation.