SOURCE: “A Dramatist, or Two,” in New Statesman, Vol. 55, May 31, 1958, pp. 692, 694.

In the following review, Worsley describes Pinter as an off-beat playwright of considerable promise.

A new play by a new playwright, The Birthday Party, at the Lyric, Hammersmith, invited us to peer between the lines of the seedier reports of the News of the World. In a run-down boarding house in some windy seaside town Meg and Petey crumble inarticulately together. Petey is the man who sets out the chairs on the front, and then gloomily collects your threepence. Meg, like a character out of a John Bratby painting, feeds him on a diet of cornflakes—when she remembers to buy any. In the last two years there has been one ‘guest’ and he has become a ‘permanent’, a fat, pudgy, short-sighted young man, Stanley—not so young now either, a little backward evidently, but Meg has...