Before the dormant dramatist in Harold Pinter surfaced with The Room (1957), he had already published some poetry and toured Ireland with Anew McMaster’s Shakespearean company, often playing Iago. Acting, always close to Pinter’s heart and craft, was something he could never let go of, in neither its stage nor its screen versions. His early familiarity with an audience, with throwing words at them and contributing to the dynamics of the plot engendered the debatable “intuitive”, and debatably “less intellectual” process of his writing.

This practical education also revealed to Pinter what words could veil in the process of being uttered. If meaning exists in the gaps between words as much as in the words themselves, if the timing and location of a word in a single act of speech and the manner of its utterance add or take away from the meaning, then words are not what they say. At least, they are not merely what they say. Nor do they say it all. They assume hidden significances and a suggestiveness that de-familiarise us with our universe, when the everyday, “normal” circumstances of our being and becoming come alive with the threat of violence, of rupture and loss. But we soon realise that the suddenly palpable menace was always there. We don’t know the source and direction of our fear, we don’t know the denouement ahead, we don’t know if there is any denouement at all. We fear that two men will come one day to take us away, we don’t know who they are, we don’t know what they want, yet we have an unconscious intuitive understanding of it all. If there’s any hint of what we must do, it is: “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do!” This sensibility came to be called “Pinteresque”, after the master of the unspoken; the master of the “Pause” as a dramatic device, morefamously as a stage direction in his scripts.

... contd.