SOURCE: “‘Yes! In the Sea of Life Enisled’: Harold Pinter's Other Places,” in Harold Pinter: A Casebook, edited by Lois Gordon, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990, pp. 161-88.

In the following essay, Mengel examines the themes of isolation and loneliness in A Kind of Alaska, Victoria Station and Family Voices.

Harold Pinter's Other Places opened at the National Theatre on 14 October 1982 in London, under the direction of Peter Hall.¹ Other Places is a trilogy that combines three short plays of a different character: A Kind of Alaska dramatises the awakening of a patient after twenty-nine years of comatose or trance-like sleep; in Victoria Station, the controller of a radio-taxi station tries in vain to persuade one of his drivers to pick up a customer; in Family Voices, a son, a mother and a father express their feelings after the son has gone away from home.

On the surface, the title...