If we seek, in twentieth-century criticism, for anything approaching the extent of the detailed verbal analysis of Pinter's plays, we find it only in commentaries on Yeats, Eliot and Christopher Fry. In short, we find it in poetic dramatists in whose language the technical and aesthetic resources of poetry and verse are used to a very high degree. (p. 166)

Pinter's language is generally regarded by the intelligent theatregoer and by some perceptive critics as a remarkable evocation of 'real speech'. It is often declared to be the embodiment of the way we speak—half-inarticulate, stumbling, leaving questions completely or half-unanswered, lacking clarity—generally of meaning, often of articulation. Both 'real' language and Pinter's version of it, are a long way from that of the 'well-made' play and even from the studiously-constructed naturalistic drama of, say, Galsworthy and Shaw. Indeed it is easy to conclude that Pinter's language is a particular antithesis of Shaw's, having nothing of its sinewy articulateness, its directness, its wit, its socratic poising of question and answer, statement and counter-statement, its almost embarrassing lucidity. (p. 167)

At face value, certainly, Pinter 'sounds' like people speak…. [When] Pinter (as in No Man's Land) writes 'educated', balanced, apparently intellectually superior characters, they still manage to sound inconsequential. (pp. 167-68)

Compare the language of a well-made play with a Pinter play, and a contrast is apparent—verbal purpose, direction as opposed to apparent ad hoc verbal activity. We may, indeed, push the matter a little further and declare that his plays do not, in the conventional sense, 'end' at all. They stop.

But although we seem to recognize, in … real speech, the Pinter timbre, we should, if we listen carefully, also realize that it lacks, unquestionably, a kind of tension which Pinter habitually possesses. This, in itself, should warn us against a too close association between the real and the written. Pinter's language is as taut as a bow-string—it contains a potential that the real neither has nor intends. (pp. 168-69)

One very important facet of [Pinter's uniqueness] is that the language is eminently written for the actor—he is a player's playwright—as a kind of code. This is not to say that other dramatists, using very different modes, are not aware of the requirements of the actor. However, Pinter is unique in expressing his awareness in this extraordinarily precise way.

Yet, however much a close examination of Pinter's language reveals a sophistication of concept and technique, it is difficult still not to feel the tang of 'real' speech in it….

Pinter is no more and no less successful in depicting the speech patterns we recognize in the disaffected, the under-privileged, as in Davies, than he is with the sophisticates in Old Times, or the pompous (with a trace of Jewish incantation) in Goldberg. We recognize them all. We swear we have heard people who sound like this. (p. 170)

[However, it] is extraordinarily difficult to visualize Pinter's characters; they are, until an actor becomes them, particularly disembodied. No one on this earth looks like a Pinter character.

The difficulty of visualizing them or assessing what they are like or what motivates them is due to the fact that a Pinter person is not complete—it is a piece of ore that we experience, and a small piece at that…. In fact the range of emotions covered is very small and though he uses the speech-characteristics of different social and professional classes, the characters who speak this speech are too partially-formed to represent their class—they sound as if they come from this or that class, but they do not in any other way relate to it. What Pinter has done has been to endow very fragmentary dramatis personae with the apparent characteristics of totally-rounded characters, and he has done it by creating a language which to a degree 'impersonates' the real, but which very often has its own ritual and rules, its own life….

And, indeed, even when we are, in the hands of this supreme verbal magician, lulled into believing that what we hear is 'real', inside the speech a certain stylization is at work. (p. 171)

The effect, in reading the text, is as if you were coming across or, more accurately, being led into, a short or extended poetic image. It is poetic because of the technical resources of rhyme, repetition, rhythm and out-of-the-ordinary verbal resonance; it is an image because although the impersonation of real speech is always, to a degree, present, what is being said is a key which unlocks a door to what is unsaid. (pp. 172-73)

The development of Pinter's expertise and sensitivity with language has not meant a departure from this basic 'metaphorical' writing but a subtilizing and complicating of it in structure, tone and implication. In The Homecoming there occurs not the first but, up to that point, the best manifestation of that development, for in it there is a complete and superb integration of dramatic language with the language of theatre. Throughout his career Pinter has been acutely aware of, and has utilized, inanimate objects, stage-furniture, and made them into extra dramatis personae. The newspaper, the spectacles and the electric light in The Birthday Party [are examples]…. Even when there is no one dominating object, the reader and the theatregoer are made to feel, every time an object is handled or even mentioned, that it means significantly more than mere touch or mention. Nothing, so to speak, is wasted—the realistic bric-à-brac of the well-made play seems, by comparison, museum'd and inert: in Pinter inanimate objects seem always on the point of coming to life…. Each time, in The Room, a stage-direction occurs, an extra dimension is added not just to the action of the play, but to the elusive meaning that lies behind the words. (p. 173)

The customary notion of a Pinter play is that it sidles inconsequentially from an unimportant point A to an indeterminate point X, Y or Z—it does not matter which. In fact the verbal image-building which has been noted produces an episodic structure…. The movement of a Pinter play on stage is very much one of ebb and flow. The extended images represent points of crisis, but between their appearances there lie areas of relaxation. (pp. 173-74)

Pinter's plays are 'about' certain states of feeling (rather more, indeed, about feeling than thinking) which are presented to us in human embodiment—it is a kind of allegorical writing. The feeling is the character just as surely as, in a mediaeval play, the vice or the virtue is the character—the message is the medium….

Many of Pinter's plays are, to a degree, concerned with one or other of the seven deadly sins and these are embodied in characters, though he does not, like the earlier playwrights, often depict or assume or imply the existence of virtue. Good Deeds, we may say, has little to do with Pinter's Everyman, but Lust, Pride, Avarice have.

It is, therefore, as wrong to assess a Pinter 'character' and the language it uses in customary psychologically realistic terms as it is to conceive of a dramatized mediaeval Vice or Virtue in those terms. (p. 174)

Older critics would claim that his work is poetic because it uses, though in ways that are often covert or disguised, many of the conventional resources of poetic communication—rhythm, associative value of words, image-making, tonal effect. He is poetic in the deeper sense that no specific and clear literal meaning can be abstracted from the majority of his plays. In a very obvious sense you not only change a Pinter play if you try to translate it into different terms, you destroy it in the way you would destroy any work of art and, moreover, you find you are no nearer the heart of a mystery. (p. 175)

The allusive and the elusive predominate in Pinter—unlike naturalistic prose-drama where it is either non-existent or of marginal effect. Unlike so many of his contemporary prose-naturalistic colleagues Pinter neither seems in any sense to want to lead men to action nor to relate his events and characters to explicit contemporary actualities; he exhibits no anger, looking either backward or forward, about the establishment, and he seems not to have considered the social causes of underprivilege and tried to root them out.

Pinter incites the imagination, troubles the spirit, and excites the emotions. None of his plays, while we are actually watching them, engage us in any 'issue', moral or otherwise—the 'experience' given us with dramatic subtlety, verbal sophistication and a complete awareness of theatrical possibilities is too strong to allow us to engage ourselves with anything else. It is only afterwards when, in any case, we are often trying to pin down meaning, that the question of 'issues' may arise—as, for example, the 'morality' of The Homecoming.

Pinter is not concerned with the actualities of man in society but, taking on the traditional function of the poet, with some of the realities of what man is. He uses, as many poets have done, the sense-data of the contemporary world as a sharp salt, but it is no more.

When we enter into a Pinter room we have to accept a format which embraces states of feeling rather than impersonates the real world, which is self-sufficient and has very much more the status of an image rather than of an actuality. (pp. 175-76)