SOURCE: “Harold Pinter,” in Harold Pinter, Columbia University Press, 1967, pp. 3-45.

In the following essay, Kerr argues that not only is Pinter an existentialist writer, but that his plays are written in an existentialist manner.

Harold Pinter seems to me the only man working in the theater today who writes existentialist plays existentially. By this I mean that he does not simply content himself with restating a handful of existentialist themes inside familiar forms of playmaking. He remakes the play altogether so that it will function according to existentialist principle.

To show this it will be necessary to recapitulate briefly, and at the expense of some subtlety, the premises on which existentialist philosophy rests. At root, existentialism rejects the ancient Platonic principle that essence precedes existence.

What does this mean, practically speaking? Platonic theory, made more explicit by Aristotle and then accepted as a habit of thought by...