SOURCE: Barnwell, Michael. “The Plots Behind the Plots.” American Theatre (September 1997): 57-8.

In the following review of The Life and Works of Harold Pinter, by Michael Billington, Barnwell criticizes the author for providing an overly laudatory biography of Pinter.

In the mid-1950s, an English repertory actor going by the stage name of David Baron [Harold Pinter] wrote an enigmatic short play about an unusual couple living as recluses in their spare one-room apartment. The couple, a woman who chatters incessantly and a man who is portentously reticent, are beset by any number of imagined—or are they real?—terrors. Despite their best efforts to maintain their isolation, an unsettling visitor bearing a seemingly innocuous and obscure message makes a breach, eliciting a furious and ultimately fatal response. In this simple room, meticulously encased in noir menace, Beckettian suspense and a lyrical, melancholic longing, the groundwork was laid...