SOURCE: “Harold Pinter's Happy Families,” in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 8, No. 4, Autumn, 1967, pp. 703-12.

In the following essay, Storch argues that Pinter's plays are about the anxiety and menace Pinter sees at the heart of the bourgeois family.

The shock-tactics of Harold Pinter's dramaturgy are so effective that his audience, cowed into the pit of irrationality, is afraid to ask why in the name of anxiety it has succumbed, and what it is in the plays that gives them such insidious power. To ask the question at all may seem silly, because Pinter, we know, deliberately destroys all clues for a rational appraisal: the irrationality is the major part of the meaning. Everyone has of course experienced the menace and terror and loneliness which are generally applauded as Pinter's chief dramatic effects. It is not only drama critics who by sheer repetition have made us accept anxiety and...