A shabby seaside lodging house; a meek little man bitterly hurt when as a birthday present he is given a child's toy drum; two visitors, one fast-talking, the other viciously sinister; these things, when Harold Pinter's "The Birthday Party" received its famous first production, sent through one a surge of joy and wonder and awe at the revelation of a new dramatist of indisputable genius….

One has something of the same excitement in watching Caryl Churchill's "Objections to Sex and Violence."… Neither Miss Churchill nor Mr Pinter believes that it is necessary, nor even possible, to explain everything. In "The Birthday Party" we know neither why Stanley is persecuted, nor why everything that Goldberg does to Stanley will eventually be done to Goldberg. In "Objections to Sex and Violence" the bikini-clad girl on the beach never gives an adequate explanation of her implacable resolution to say No to society.

This sense of obscurity, this feeling that we live, precariously, in a world beyond rational explanation, is one of the most powerful factors in the work of both authors. Mr Pinter exploits the verbally concrete and ideologically amorphous: "Who watered the wicket at Melbourne?" And Miss Churchill goes so far, in a fascinating disquisition on the possible meanings of the phrase "I believe," as to show that the very words which we use to disperse obscurity are themselves obscure.