SOURCE: “The City Beyond the Door: Effects of the Urban Milieu in Pinter's Early Plays,” in Theatre Studies, Vol. 37, 1992, pp. 57-65.

In the following essay, Rose explores the influence of the interior and exterior urban environment on Pinter’s plays.

Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, often used the maxim, “Every force evolves a form.”¹ The force of Pinter's dramaturgical vision led him to the crafting of the distinctive form of the Pinteresque drama, one of indoor menace², to use Bert O. States' phrase. But one might with equal validity cite Sartre's thought as Mother Lee's: “Every technique leads to metaphysics.”³ States, a phenomenologist, postulates that Pinter is to Strindberg as Beckett is to Chekhov—that the work of the more recent pair of playwrights reflects the logical development of the epistemological stance of the realistic theatre. “Strindberg's characters,” writes States,

at the dawn of the new...