SOURCE: “After No Man's Land: A Progress Report,” in Harold Pinter: Critical Approaches, edited by Steven H. Gale, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986, pp. 153-63.

In the following essay, Hinchliffe provides an overview of Pinter’s plays from No Man’s Land to Players.

No Man's Land opened on 23 April 1975 and marked the culmination of twenty years' work in the theatre, work interspersed with other kinds of writing—poetry, plays for radio and television, adaptations and film scripts—and other kinds of work—acting and directing. The longest gap between stage plays was that between The Caretaker (1960) and The Homecoming (1965), but during that time Pinter produced plays for television and two, if not three, film scripts. In short, Austin Quigley is probably correct when he suggests that of all the dramatists who came to the fore in the middle fifties in the British theatre only Pinter has consistently maintained...