Chapter 1 Introduction

As the winner of the Nobel Prize of Literature in 2005, Harold Pinter stands out as one of the most distinguished figures on the post-war British stage both because of his unique voice against the background of the socially committed dramatic mood and his representative position in the mainstream English drama. Beginning his writing career in the late 1950s, Pinter is one of the few who survived the rise and the fall of the first generation of British dramatists in the second half of the 20th century and still kept his creative strength to the 1990s. Actually, he has been, in many cases, regarded by critics as the best British dramatist. In Peter Hall's words, Pinter's poetic nature in his dramatic writing makes him finally tower “above everybody else, whatever their merits.” Kimball King's assessment suggests a similar view about Pinter's leading position on the English stage:

Harold Pinter's guiding role in virtually all important aspects of modern drama cannot be overlooked. It could be said that Beckett's poetic minimalism, dense with meaning, and John Osborne's creative use of the stage to express his feelings of outrage and injustice, began a spirited uncovering of theatrical possibility. It remained for Pinter to alter expectations of drama permanently, however, and the language, action, and meaning of all performance art is inevitably measured against his achievements.

Pinter's style, commonly known as “Pinteresque, ” has been presented as “a signifier of the new dramatic norms” and “a dramatic paradigm, which serves the reviewers to enhance the acceptance of new playwrights.” According to Dominic Shellard, “Harold Pinter is arguably the most significant British playwright to have emerged from the fifties. With Ashes to Ashes,premiered in the West End in 1996,he is certainly the most enduring.”

Ever since the staging of his first play,The Room(1957),innumerable critics have written on Pinter, negatively as well as favorably. Surveying the critical voices about him over the six decades, we may find that the main approaches of interpretations can be roughly classified into the following groups.

First of all, as Pinter achieved his success in the late 1950s, his works were unavoidably examined at the very beginning against the two contrasting theatrical forms of the period—social realism and the Theatre of the Absurd.The fact is that Pinter's early plays from The Room to The Birthday Party received almost widespread rejection.Reviewers'criticism of Pinter then was mainly about the obscurity of his works and the lack of serious meanings and social commitment. This accusation became a critical disaster when his first masterpiece,The Birthday Party,was staged in 1958, with Harold Hobson as the only exception. After watching the premier of the play, W. A. Darlington declared: “The author never got down to earth enough to explain what his play was about, so I can't tell you.” Darlington concluded that all the characters in the play are mad except Meg's husband. Even the next play by Pinter, the widely-celebrated The Caretaker did not escape similar attacks. While admitting Pinter's talent reflected in The Caretaker,for example,Bernard Levin comments,“Nothing emerges. There is no sense of a view, however oblique, of these characters, no disclosure of a general truth based on particular conclusions, no comment, wise or otherwise, on anything.”

This accusation of “nothingness” in Pinter's plays results essentially from his seeming vacuum of the social commitment, which can be prevailingly found in such dramatists as John Osborne and Arnold Wesker. As Tom McGrath writes,

After all the surface layers have been removed, the various puzzles untied, it is clear that Pinter is saying, precisely, nothing. His play is his style …. The kind of cold, fishy gaze he turns on the characters in his plays is the gaze he wishes he could turn on real life. What looks in his work like an almost Zennish detachment is, in fact, a disaffiliation, a refusal to be involved. And behind this refusal there is the fear of involvement and its angst-causing consequences.

So, it is mainly because of a lack of social commentary and realism that the critics attacked Pinter.In the words of an article in The Stage,“Pinter can convey the unease of modern society, the hidden antagonisms, the anguish and gnawing worry of his characters, but he can never resolve—or let the characters work out some kind of solution to—the menacing problems.” It is not until the 1980s that a strong defending voice began to be heard. For example, Elizabeth Sakellaridou writes:

The lack of a political or a social or a religious message does not prove moral indifference or a vacuum of values. What appears on the surface as stern, arid amorality is in fact Pinter's exclusive attention to the workings of the human mind and psyche, which are often automatic, instinctual and pre-conscious and have little relevance to political ideology, social structure or moral codes.

As time went on, the initial blaming voice was replaced by the general recognition of the essential seriousness of Pinter's works.

Connected with the accusation of Pinter's lack of social involvement is the perception of his artistic aloofness from the prevailing mood of the socially committed theatre. As Ronald Knowles states,

In comparison with the realists Pinter did not speak from a recognizable political platform. In contrast, he deconstructs social realism by divorcing the identification of character and environment, defamilarising the pedestrian and destablising the audience with ultimately self-recriminating laughter.

The two categories Kenneth Tynan defines in his assessment of the post-war British dramatists reflect effectively the critical views about Pinter at that time: while Tynan labels John Osborne, John Arden and Arnold Weaker as “the hairy men—heated, embattled, socially committed playwrights, ” he describes dramatists like Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard as “the smooth men—cool, apolitical stylists.” Moreover, Susan Rusinko also believes that, compared with Osborne whose importance remains historical in laying the socially committed tradition, Pinter's contribution rests mainly on breaking new stylistic ground. Following the different views of seeing theatre as “an engaged social phenomenon or as a politically indifferent aesthetic artifact, ” John Fleming and Christopher Innes share the similar opinion in regarding Pinter as an antithesis to such writers as Wesker, who believe in the social effect of drama.

Singling out Pinter as an apolitical stylist, quite a few of critics naturally attach a label of Absurdism to Pinter's plays. Reviewers repeatedly compare Pinter to Samuel Beckett and E. Ionesco, regarding him as a British representative of the European avant-garde. As Yael ZarhyLevo comments, “the inexplicable quality of Pinter's style, used by the critics to justify their initial rejection, serves subsequently as their means for selling him to the public, and eventually becomes his trademark.” In the opinion of Martin Esslin, Pinter's A Slight Ache has clear echoes of Beckett's novel,Molloy,while The Caretaker can be seen as derivative of Waiting for Godot. According to Esslin,Pinter's affinity to Beckett lies in his creative process:

It is the confluence of the obsessive image that springs from the very depths of the writer's subconscious with the technical skills that have become second nature to him that creates the curious quality of Pinter's plays. By taste and inclination, Pinter is a poet deeply influenced by Joyce, Beckett, and Kafka.

Susan Rusinko also believes that it is under the influence of Beckett that Pinter challenges the existing stage with his stylistic and linguistic innovations. But in Tim Brassell's views, what connects Pinter with the Theatre of the Absurd is his refusal to minimize the audience's awareness that what they are watching is a performance, a gathering and collusion of author, actor and audience, in which the audience's role extends beyond a simple passive voyeurism. Brassell also points out that it is because of this association with the Absurdists that Pinter becomes initially an antithesis to the general mood of the realism:

The “mainstream” is held, with an undiminished grip, by the regrouped forces of realism. But there are a number of important British writers, mostly working in relative isolation from one another, who have taken the imaginative boldness of the Absurdists and something, perhaps, of their philosophy to heart in pursuing their own paths of formal experimentation along non-naturalistic lines.

Here, one of the boldest experimental Absurdists mentioned by Brassell is Pinter. Pinter's relationship to Beckett has still been a critical subject even in the past decade. As Lois Gordon states, “Pinter may indeed have revered Beckett in the same way Beckett revered Joyce. Matters of personal, political, and literary styles aside, Beckett and Pinter clearly share one trait:an absolute commitment to the purity of the word.”

But different opinions are also heard of the influence of Absurdism on Pinter. For example, Christopher Innes argues that Beckett's influence on Pinter has been over-emphasized. Ronald Knowles also points out, “Beckett and Pinter use theatricality to quite opposite ends: Godot dismantles religion and philosophy to reveal the emptiness of teleological truth, whereas The Caretaker ultimately transcends theatricality by realizing arguably the only truth we have, existence itself.”

Besides Pinter's aloofness from social realism and the influence of Absurdism on him, another early popular angle of Pinter study is the psychoanalytic approach initiated by Martin Esslin. Analyzing Pinter's three early major plays, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and The Homecoming, Esslin points out the existence of symmetrical Oedipal relations and analogies in them. Following this direction of psychoanalysis, many other critics have tried to examine the pre-societal and pre-conscious world in Pinter's plays, which alienates the dramatist's characters from the immediate contemporary reality. While Lucina P. Gabbard emphasizes the dream structure in Pinter's plays, Katherine H. Burkman reads Pinter's works through myth and ritual, Thomas Adler discusses his work with reference to Jungian psychological concepts, and Marc Silverstein approaches Pinter's plays with Lacan's theory. Among these voices, Gabbard's reading of Pinter's plays as dream texts might be the most traditional one. According to him, Pinter's characters are but unconsciously motivated, and they are grouped around Oedipal wishes, involving punishment and anxiety dreams. In Kafka and Pinter Shadow-Boxing, Raymond Armstrong's research takes the form of comparative study of Pinter and Kafka in their themes of the patri-filial struggle as archetypal conflict. The study results in the discovery that the revolt of all the young men in Pinter's family plays ends in a return of the sons to the fathers.

The fourth angle of Pinter criticism is a discussion on the artistic features of his works, such as the facet of ambiguity, the use of memory, the linguistic approach to language and the artistic form of comedy. Here, the quality of ambiguity in Pinter's works is one reason that attracted early reviewers' attacks. Charles Marowitz, a contemporary playwright of Pinter's, makes such a comment on The Caretaker,

An elaborate network of ambiguity stretched tight over a simple little story. Although it is searingly accurate in its diction and characterization, it is too organized and surreal in effect to be called naturalistic. If Pinter uses tape-records to achieve such verisimilitude, he also edits his tapes poetically to avoid stale reproductions of life.

The question of ambiguity became even sharper with Pinter's prevalent use of memory in his plays in the 1970s, as Frank Marcus discusses Pinter's No Man's Land:

Needless to say, the author is throwing sand in our eyes. By the end, we are not sure whether he [the tramp in the play] writes poems or clears away glasses in a pub …. The crucial bond between them is shared memories—but memories are notoriously unreliable ….Pinter's refusal to answer this question, except by indicating a multiplicity of identities, is the core of his art.

The artistic facet of Pinter's ambiguity puzzles people so much that critics like George E. Wellwarth declares, “Pinter is the only critic who has made any sense of Pinter.”

Like the psychoanalytic reading of Pinter's works, the linguistic approach to Pinter study also begins with Martin Esslin, who gives some original analysis of Pinter's linguistic and stylistic devices of employing silence and pause in Pinter the Playwright.Esslin takes Pinter's dramatic dialogue as a double charge and believes that a second string of meaning belies the factual meaning of his dramatic words. Since then, more reviewers have taken the linguistic approach. For instance, Austin E. Quigley states that there is a pervasive discontinuity in the action of Pinter's plays, which is the major source of the atmosphere of abstraction that surrounds the character interaction.But,after a close reading of No Man's Land,he concludes that a structure actually lies beneath the play's careful manipulations of the discontinuity and fragmentation. To critics like Michael Billington, language in Pinter's plays operates on many levels, which is believed to be the dramatist's most significant contribution to British drama. But according to Guido Almansi, “Pinter has systematically forced his characters to use a perverse, deviant language to conceal or ignore the truth …. Pinter's idiom is essentially human because it is an idiom of lies.” He also declares that Pinter's language is one of escapist maneuverings, which studiously avoids the commitment of a conflict or confrontation. But in the view of Linda Ben-Zvi, Pinter is like a minimalist sculptor or painter, who has always taken great pleasure in making much of little, and “Only Samuel Beckett among contemporary dramatists has set more stringent restrictions on the variables in his works and his words.”

In the aspect of artistic features, critics also show their interest in Pinter's dramatic form of comedy. Since Irving Wardle published his essay,“Comedy of Menace, ” in 1958, critics have used this term conveniently to refer to the mixed mood of comedy and menace in Pinter's early works. According to Francesca Coppa, Pinter's comedy of menace has inspired a generation of black comedies written by playwrights who are willing to provide the explanations that Pinter omits. To John Orr, however, many of Pinter's plays are a kind of tragicomedy, which find menace in the ordinary. Differing from all these, Guido Almansi reads Pinter's works as plays of games: either hiding games, critical games or memory games.

Since the 1980s, more and more critics' attention has been drawn to Pinter's dramatic writings for other media such as screen and radio. For example, Jennifer L. Randisi, Francis Gillen and Linda Renton write from the angle of screen plays; Albert Wertheim conducts research on Pinter's radio plays; Stanley Eveling and Ronald Knowles make a comparative study of Pinter in the aspects of radio/stage and performance/text. Significantly, Steven H. Gale, after a careful analysis of Pinter's screenwriting, concludes, “for Pinter, the filming allowed him not only to capture certain elements that had been present in the play but to magnify them.”

Nevertheless, among all the perspectives of Pinter study, the most prevalent topic of research is the themes of his plays, such as menace, territory, power, politics, betrayal and gender. Among early critical views about Pinter, critics like Katherine H. Burkman, Benedict Nightingale, Lucina P. Gabbard, and Steven H. Gale all read Pinter's plays as a fight for territory or comedies of menace. Referring to Pinter's depiction of the palpable and imperceptible threat, Dominic Shellard states that “Mr. Pinter has got hold of a primary fact of existence. We live on the verge of disaster.” To Shellard, Pinter's threat is not that sort of exploding hydron bombs, but a subtler sort. By contrast, Steven E. Gale's suggests that“Having established that menace is pervasive in the modern world, he [Pinter] turned his attention to the source of that menace … menace does not derive from an external, physical source. It comes from within the individual and is psychological in nature.”

Another motif that has received considerable critical attention is Pinter's portrayal of women. Victor Cahn, Elizabeth Sakellaridou, and Michelene Wandor all give some interesting analyses of Pinter's female characters and comment on his views about the gender issues. According to Michelene Wandor, Pinter's women are portrayed as cultural outsiders, who intrude themselves into the already shifting social and familial conventions. Bill Naismith reads Pinter's female characters against the background of the whole feminist movement that rose in the 1960s and the 1970s. By contrast, Geetha Ramanathan's opinion is: although the women in Pinter's plays, for their sexuality, can make men appear insufficient or shake their confidence in their own masculinity, Pinter's dramatic world is actually a world without women.

Beside these themes, politics is another favorite topic among critics like Marc Silverstein, C. W. E. Bigsby and Christopher Innes. In the view of Marc Silverstein, Pinter's politics is power politics that reveals the cultural order. Differing from Silverstein, Austin Quigley thinks of Pinter's politics in postmodern terms. He suggests that “Rather than showing that the personal is the political by dissolving the personal into the political, Pinter has, effectively, dramatized the converse: that the political is, among other things, the personal.” By contrast, Francesca Coppa associates Pinter's motif of politics with his form of comedy: “the act of telling a joke forces everyone within earshot to become a part of the event …. The third party, the audience, is forced to take sides in the conflict between the joke teller to ally oneself with the victim. Comedy thus functions as a sort of litmus test for the audience.” Different from Coppa, Drew Milne attempts to discuss Pinter's political stance by referring to the issue of gender:“Perhaps unintentionally, Pinter's predominant focus on male characters reveals conflicts of sexual difference as the micro-politics of social being.” Among the critical voices, reviewers rarely examine Pinter's politics from the aspect of class. Only C. W. E. Bigsby refers briefly to Pinter's class origin when he points out the fact that Pinter has never used his working-class characters to serve political or social objectives.

Last of all, critical research about Pinter also takes the form of a comparative study: as Ronald Knowles says, “it is probably safe to say that there is not a single dramatist of the twentieth century with whom Pinter has not been compared or contrasted, from Ibsen to David Mamet.” Christopher Innes, for example, compares Pinter with his contemporary political dramatists from the aspect of his shift of political stance: “His political involvement represents a moral commitment, rather than a belief that the stage can change the world; and this distinguishes his works from the more propagandistic approach of Arden and Edward Bond over the same period.” C. W. E. Bigsby makes a similar contrast between Pinter and other political dramatists by referring to their class origins: “as for Pinter, his class origins were, of course, a red herring from the start.” D. Keith Peacock puts a special emphasis on the opposition between Pinter's private theatre and the group-created alternative theatre (or fringe theatre). As he writes, with memory plays, “Pinter staged his own aesthetic revolution, ” thereby, unlike those fringe productions that replaced verbal by physical expression, Pinter moved in the opposite direction.

Examining all these critical approaches, one may find two points that are cardinally connected with the views in the present book. First, most of the researches are either conducted with reference to the critiques of the prevalent moods of the post-war New British Theatre, or are pursued on the basis of Pinter's texts and performances. Therefore, not many critics read Pinter from the angle of the author and the text. Though the psychoanalytic interpretation usually begins with a brief reference to Pinter's personal life as a starting point for its argument, it does not go deep in this respect.

The fact is that we find few critical researches place real emphasis on Pinter's life for an interpretation of the meanings of his text. Except Michael Billington's biography of the dramatist, all the critics' reference to the author's personal life is sketchy and limited. In the first authoritative study of Pinter, Pinter the Playwright, Martin Esslin depicts briefly the dramatist's Jewish background, both social and personal, against which Pinter grew up. He suggests that this harsh and violent background not only leads to Pinter's political stance of radical pacifism, but also fosters the dramatist's sense of existential fear. In Bill Naismith's analysis, he also mentions the same significant events in Pinter's life: his Jewish birth, the bombing experience and the threat symbolized by the German Gestapo during the war, and the Fascist anti-Semitism in East London after the war, which became part of a general consciousness—a traumatic experience in Pinter's mind. But the problem is that both Esslin's and Naismith's examination of the dramatist's biographical experience is too general to be able to explain explicitly how the significant events mentioned above shaped Pinter's works and were “to have life-long consequences.” Moreover, such limited critical study based on Pinter's early life usually results in the conclusion of the theme of menace shown in his plays before 1970. Commenting on Pinter's three comedies of menace, Steven H. Gale writes:

Pinter's boyhood experiences obviously influenced the themes of these plays and the style with which he expressed those themes. Menace and dominance are his major concerns in these early dramas. The basic metaphor is that of a room or some other sanctuary about to be invaded.

Besides Gale, other reviewers who write on Pinter's plays from this angle include David T. Thompson and Steven Moss. While Thompson, drawing on Pinter's experience as an actor in the theatre of the time, argues that his diverse experience (as an actor) contributes directly to the unique quality of his drama, Stephen Moss puts a special emphasis on the influence of Pinter's life on his mysterious creative process:

Pinter sometimes implies that he is not writing the work; the work is writing him. That also helps to explain the long periods between plays in the past years and the increasing difficulty of writing as his career has progressed. He has to wait for the donnee, for the image that sparks the thought, for the stream of consciousness to flow. Many of those donnees were drawn from his childhood … from his impoverished years in rep in the 50s.

The book that highlights predominantly the connection between Pinter's life and his works is the biography written by Michael Billington in 1996,The Life and Work of Harold Pinter.This is the up-to-date,most detailed and authoritative study of the dramatists' life and work. The book tries to trace the breeding process of Pinter's plays and locate them in the general landscape of his social, personal, and above all, artistic life as a whole. Placing the dramatic work in the developing context of Pinter's life, Billington illustrates how his plays are shown frequently to be the products of the writer's recollections of his own experience and the results of the inspiration of some specific incidents in his life. But the problem is that no matter how much light the personal information that Billington provides about Pinter's life throws on his plays, the book is after all a biography, and its focus is on the general picture of the dramatist's life, against which the works are commented as part of the dramatist's literary experience.

The second important point that one may find about the critical reviews of Pinter over the past half century is that though critics have explored the feature of contradiction and ambiguity in his plays, not many scholars have ever analyzed systematically the quality of duality prevailing both in his dramatic themes and styles. Among the few critics who have noticed the phenomenon of duality in Pinter's works, Dominic Shellard's emphasis is mainly on the aspect of Pinter's dramaturgy: “Pinter's dramaturgy incorporates aspects of both working-class realism and absurd.” By contrast, what C. W. E. Bigsby perceives is a contradictory process occurring in Pinter's plays as a psychological conflict in each character, a conflict between an inner reality struggling to remain private and those situations compelling its verbal expression.

The critic who makes the most intensive analysis of the duality in Pinter might be Martin Esslin, who observes a paradox in Pinter's artistic personality. On the one hand, he points out that unlike Kafka and Beckett who are moving in a surreal world of acknowledged fantasy, Pinter remains essentially on the firm ground of everyday reality (his dialogue and characters are real). But, on the other hand, he says, the over-all effect of Pinter's works is one of mystery and poetic ambiguity. According to Esslin, the seeming contradiction between the meticulous outward reality and the dreamlike, nightmarish quality of the plays owes much to Pinter's subjective (poetic) method itself. By analyzing Pinter's article, “A Note on Shakespeare, ” Esslin concludes that, like Shakespeare, Pinter makes his private wound a mirror of the world's:

For out of the wound of existential anguish springs the playwright's effort to come to terms with the world and its mystery, its suffering, its bewildering multiplicity. The wound, the playwright's eye, his perception of the world, is open: that is why all the world enters into it. The wound is the world. And the world is the wound.

Here, Esslin implies that “the dual nature of Pinter's works, the simultaneous co-existence within it of the most extreme naturalism of surface description and of a dreamlike, poetic feeling” is the result of the fact that Pinter records the world through“his eyes.”So, in Pinter, the“objectivity is self-expression, ”and the meticulously recorded world by Pinter is “a metaphor of his inner world.” This is the meaning of the poetic dramatist that Esslin calls Pinter.

Here, Esslin is right in emphasizing the subjectivity of Pinter's writing process, but the stress on the dramatist's poetic method of creation as the cause of the duality cannot explain fully the dual nature in his works. In fact, the duality in Pinter's works is not between the socially objective depiction and the private expression of the dramatist's personality. The duality lies in the mixture of the two levels of presentation in Pinter's plays: the social (external) perspective and the psychological (inner) one.It is on the overlapping realm of the social and psychological voices that Pinter is to dramatize in his plays.

So, there are three basic points about the plays by Pinter that this book intends to analyze: (1) there exists a prevailing feature of duality which appears in various (either contradictory or paralleling) forms of double act in Pinter's works; (2) this dual quality has been caused by the double perspectives formed by his early experiences in him; (3) this duality eventually explains Pinter's unique position in the New British drama: though seemingly aloof from the majority of his contemporary political dramatists (in the dramatic aim and form), Pinter is able to enjoy a leading position in the mainstream theatre. If put in another way, this book is to discuss from the angle of the author and the text how the double perspectives shaped in Pinter's early experience work as the creative dynamic, leading to the dual feature in the themes and artistic styles of his writings, and eventually making his work echo the voice of the time while simultaneously distinguishing him from the dominating political dramatists.

There are five chapters (not including the introduction and conclusion part) in this book. Following the introduction, Chapter 2 will begin its research by analyzing how the traumatic experience of Pinter's around the Second World War and his time in Hackney makes Pinter both sensitive to the social problems and fascinated with the inner psyche of the people around him, thereby fostering his social sense of injustice as well as apolitical idea of universal existence of power desires in human relationship. Moreover, this chapter will also explain how that part of Pinter's experience shapes his conflicting feelings toward the female as a whole.

Chapter 3 deals mainly with the double voices of moral scrutiny and of apolitical non-commitment in Pinter's plays. Throughout his plays from The Birthday Party to Ashes to Ashes,there are always conflicting moods that suggest a dilemma in the dramatist. In one aspect, there is a moral tilting and a suggestion of political leaning even in the most ambiguous political work like The Birthday Party;in another aspect,there is always an undercurrent of pessimism in Pinter's plays that implies the universal existence of power desire, which undermines the political strength in the first voice here.

Chapter 4 is to discuss Pinter's treatment of gender issue. On the one hand, Pinter's writing over the forty years seems to show an inclination of changing from a male prejudice to a tone of neutrality and even sympathy in his attitudes towards women; but on the other hand, he proves to be essentially patriarchal by taking women mainly as a convenient metaphor for more “significant” motifs of social injustice in general.

Chapter 5 examines Pinter's treatment of family, an aspect in which the feature of duality is less easy to perceive. But still one can discern two different perspectives in his treatment of the patri-filial motif: while the son-and-parent relationship is portrayed as a social one between an individual and the authoritative institution, the filial revolt against parentage is presented psychologically rather than morally as a stereotypical relation where there is no clear line between right and wrong, love and hatred.

Chapter 6 is to explore Pinter's artistic styles, where the dual nature of his plays finds reflection in his unique forms of realism and discourse. Unlike the social realism represented by John Osborne and Arnold Wesker which stresses the external reality, Pinter's realism focuses its attention on the inner reality of his characters, i.e., the “scars” left by the external social life in their private realm. Paralleling with the two iterating levels in presenting the inner reality, Pinter develops a unique discourse of textualized memory: memory is employed like the text that can be re-written freely so that it not only displays the lying nature of social language, but also reveals the true voice in the character's psyche.

The conclusion will illustrate how the dual nature of Pinter's works determines his unique position on the post-war British stage. If his poetic (subjective) approach to the dramatic writing and his apolitical tendency of non-commitment in social affairs distinguish him strikingly from the majority of his contemporary dramatists, the other side of his duality—his fascination with the inner reality of the characters and his moral anger as a universal citizen against the dominance of the power over the powerless—gives his drama the essential mood of his time, thereby making it possible for him to represent at the same time the mainstream of the post-war British Theatre.