SOURCE: “Pinter Is as Pinter Does,” in The Catholic World, Vol. 210, No. 1257, December, 1969, pp. 124-26.

In the following review of Silence and Landscaping, Hughes discusses Pinter's ideas about fear of communication and examines the significance of silence in his plays.

Harold Pinter surely must be the easiest of all playwrights to imitate. One can imagine him someday doing as Graham Greene did: entering a contest for the best parody of his own work—and, of course, pseudonymously winning it.

Pinter's latest plays, Silence and Landscape, recently premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company and due in New York later this season, though even more sparse than his earlier work, and somewhat more poetic, are not really an exception. Fragments from the past, a past that as easily may be imagined as it may be real, one filtered through years of hopes, dreams and frustrations, come drifting to the surface...