SOURCE: “Plays, 1984-93: One for the Road, Mountain Language, Party Time, Moonlight,” in Understanding Harold Pinter, University of South Carolina Press, 1995, pp. 183-208.

In the following essay, Knowles surveys the plays written between 1984 and 1993, emphasizing the continuity of themes from Pinter’s earlier, detached period to the later, overtly engaged plays.

The context for the political plays—One for the Road, Mountain Language, and Party Time—is the world of public events in the 1980s, in both national and international terms. Events in the United Kingdom, the United States, South America, Turkey, and elsewhere, forced upon Pinter an urgent awareness of the imperative need for public commitment both in life and art. This chapter will survey Pinter's public engagement, with particular stress on his own statements in the period, as background to the passionate indignation that gives rise to the plays.¹

Political awakening was not a sudden conversion...