SOURCE: “Pinter,” in Six Dramatists in Search of a Language: Studies in Dramatic Language, Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 165-91.

In the following essay, Kennedy surveys Pinter's use of language, examining how he abstracts it from concrete meaning and makes language a dramatic rather than discursive element in his plays.

‘I am pretty well obsessed with words when they get going’, Pinter once said when an interviewer asked whether his creative imagination was not more visual than verbal. Pinter went on to stress the doubleness of drama: ‘It is a matter of tying the words to the image of the character standing on the stage. The two things go very closely together.’¹ This dual stress is important, for Pinter has explored the whole scale of verbal-visual power in the different dramatic media: film scripts as well as plays for radio and television flank his major plays for the theatre...