SOURCE: “Wanted—A Language,” in New Statesman, Vol. 59, January 30, 1960, pp. 149-50.

In the following review, Alvarez states that The Room and The Dumb Waiter are about the “impossibility of communication.”

Harold Pinter is … a playwright without a language, but deliberately so. Both The Room and The Dumb Waiter (Hampstead Theatre Club) are about the impossibility of communication. In The Room a married couple sit cosily together over their evening meal; the wife is having a lively conversation, cajoling, complaining, encouraging, sympathising and politely answering; and all the time her husband is silent as stone. All through the play people come and go without ever properly meeting or understanding each other. The only person who can get anything across to the wife is a blind Negro intruder; her husband kills him. It is much the same in The Dumb Waiter: two odd little cockney killers try to pass the...