SOURCE: “Harold Pinter's Theatre of Cruelty,” in Pinter at Sixty, edited by Katherine H. Burkman and John L. Kundert-Gibbs, Indiana University Press, 1993, pp. 27-36.

In the following essay, Esslin traces the depiction of cruelty in Pinter's plays from the metaphysical realm in his early plays to the actual realm in later plays as Pinter became more politically aware.

What has happened to Harold Pinter the playwright—as distinct from the screenwriter who is as busy as ever?

Since 1982, when A Kind of Alaska opened as part of a triple bill, he has published only two short plays, One for the Road and Mountain Language, and a tiny sketch, Precisely. And, while all his previous work dealt with problems such as identity, verification, the nature of reality, existential angst, the concerns of Beckett and Kafka rather than those of the committed political playwrights of his and a later generation...