A radio play which uses the qualities of sound and silence to the fullest extent cannot be translated into another medium without damage. If such plays use those attributes of radio which are unique—chiefly its intimacy, flexibility and ability to command not only absolute concentration but also active and continuous participation from the listener—then no visual treatment however fluid or evocative can avoid the problem of being too literal—of lessening both the sensual and the intellectual impact of the play. Successful radio dramatists invariably assume that their listeners possess active imaginations to add the completely personal dimension which makes a good radio play memorable to the audience.

To demonstrate that Harold Pinter's radio plays work in this way is, I think, to conclude that they are performed under ideal conditions only in the medium for which they were written—that is, on the radio.

As a playwright, Pinter possesses several easily identifiable characteristics. One is that he prefers to work with a small cast and a single setting. Most of the plays are set in rooms creating a claustrophobic effect. Whether created by sound or visually, the setting is invariably naturalistic in detail. Against this setting the characters act out inexplicable events. In radio, what information Pinter consents to give depends largely on cues like accent and idiom which reveal the speaker's class, geographical roots, and ethnic origin. Like many traditional playwrights, he also gives cues to interpretation through rhythm—the tell-tale repetitions, hesitations, incomplete sentences, phatic noises, and silences on which much of the subtext rests.

Pinter's predilection for claustrophobic atmosphere, naturalistic setting, and small casts is also ideal for radio. For a listener, it is easier to keep track of a few voices rather than a large number. Technically, one atmospheric location is easier to handle. Acting out Pinter's series of inexplicable situations in front of a naturalistic set creates uneasiness in an audience—a sense of threat. Radio can also work this way when naturalistic sound effects are the prelude and backdrop to surrealistic events. However, radio has an added advantage in that the naturalistic context can be faded out from the listener's consciousness and the world of the mind can take over.

The radio plays cover roughly the same range of themes dealt with in his stage plays. In A Slight Ache, as in The Caretaker and The Homecoming, a stranger attempts to break into a closed circle of people. Davies fails. The Matchseller and Ruth succeed. The triple nature of woman—wife, mother, whore—is one of the central themes in A Night Out, and A Slight Ache as well as Landscape, The Homecoming, and The Lover. The complex relations between victim and tormentor recur almost like an obsession in The Dwarfs, as well as The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party and The Caretaker. The unbreakable stranglehold of power exercised through blood ties, position, passivity or sexuality is another theme running through these plays.

The only theme unique to Pinter's radio work, as distinct from his stage work, also reflects the nature of the medium and that is the complete disintegration of a man's identity. This focus appears only in The Dwarfs where the radio convention of interior monologue, a form capable of fully evoking Len's hallucinations, is the core of the play. (pp. 403-04)

A Slight Ache contains many of the patterns evident in other early Pinter: an ambiguous, menacing intruder; an inexplicable struggle for power in which an apparently strong character, Edward, progressively weakens until he is replaced by another, the Matchseller; a whore/mother/wife figure who is middle-aged, sexually unsatisfied, who dreams of her youth and who transfers her allegiance from her husband to another man. Using these themes and characters, A Slight Ache looks back to The Room and The Birthday Party and forward to The Caretaker and even Ruth in The Homecoming. Flora's long soliloquy on her rape … also reminds one of Beth recalling her love affair in the dunes in Landscape. The same tone of passivity and of sensually savouring one's memories is common to both characters.

The symbolism in A Slight Ache is as concrete and explicit in meaning as the dumbwaiter, or Davies' papers in Sidcup. Edward's esoteric essays are obviously infertile and incomplete mental exercises symbolic of his sterile existence. His developing blindness is an old metaphor for waning prowess, mental and physical. The drawn-out death by scalding of the wasp trapped in the jam-pot works both as a piece of characterization (Edward's aggressive cruelty to an intruder), and as a paradigm of Edward's own destiny. The compulsively ordered and polished house and the lush, sunlit garden place the play in a firmly middle-class setting.

These motifs are worth noting as evidence of good playwriting, but they are of more interest to us as demonstrations of radio technique. References to the faculty of sight carry added emotional weight in radio, the blind medium. The opening sequence of the wasp works particularly well in sound since the noise of a wasp can be unbearably irritating. Pinter wakens the listener's senses through violent contrasts of glaring sunlight and heat and the deep shade of the scullery and the study which hide Edward. He chooses the most sensuous and musical names for his flowers: convolvulus, japonica, clematis, honeysuckle.

The Matchseller is also presented with the same highly charged physical detail. He smells…. He is a lump, a mouldering heap…. (p. 405)

And yet he changes before their eyes, from old to young, diseased to solid, nameless to named—all transformations which obviously occur in the minds of Edward and Flora but which may also be happening to the Matchseller. The radio version indicates that this process is actual with the lines: "You're getting up … you're moving … of your own volition … taking off your balaclava." followed by "You look younger."…

A Night Out belongs to a far more realistic tradition of playwriting. With the exception of Albert's abortive blow, the play does not particularly exploit the medium of sound—and yet the play's impact depends partly on the old-fashioned element of a surprise plot twist. We discover that Albert hasn't killed his mother after all and his brief moment of glory, already fading in the encounter with the prostitute is extinguished. For that part of the play to work, her appearance, alive and well, must come as a shock—and that is technically very difficult to achieve in the theatre, as a comparison of stage directions will show.

Act II, Scene iii of the stage version has this stage direction:

Albert lunges to the table, picks up the clock and violently raises it over his head. A stifled scream from the Mother.

Obviously this is followed by a very swift blackout as he raises it. One second's mistiming on the part of the lighting-board operator and the climax of the play, the mother's appearance unharmed in the last scene, is lost. (p. 406)

A Night Out suffers comparatively little from a stage performance, given an intimate performing space and fluid staging conventions. It is a play that could comfortably join a television double bill with The Collection or The Lover. A Slight Ache suffers much more loss of immediate sensory and emotional impact and much of its prismatic puzzling complexity of point of view when it is staged. But the chief casualty of theatrical adaptation is The Dwarfs, Pinter's last and most interesting play for radio. (p. 407)

The Dwarfs is not like any of the other plays that Pinter wrote. In the first place, nothing happens—even at the minimal level of plot used in Pinter's other plays. Len simply exists with Pete, with Mark, by himself, in his room or in the hospital. Nothing that Pete or Mark do or say seems to cause the changes in his head. One of Len's random remarks causes open conflict between Pete and Mark, but that is an ancillary event to the central development of the play, Len's descent into insanity. His progressive isolation is presented as a completely internal thing and it is never clear whether he cuts them off or they cut him off. It is true that in Pinter's stage plays Pinter often excludes decisive action from the stage action. We never know why Ben is ordered to kill Gus or whether Mick and Aston agree to kick Davies out of the flat, but we do see the results of these decisions in on-stage conflict. In The Dwarfs even that kind of action is abandoned. Len goes deeper into terror and emptiness without obvious external pressures of any kind.

The other characteristic of The Dwarfs which distinguishes it from Pinter's other work is that the dialogue presents a far more dense texture of symbolism and metaphor. (pp. 407-08)

[The original radio play of The Dwarfs can be read or perceived simply as a successful invitation to participate in a period in one man's life when his sanity is dissolving. But there is no author's point-of-view toward this experience, no attitude imposed on the audience. The subjective nature of the medium permits the audience to perceive events through Len's senses, his memory and his hallucinations. As the layers of ambiguity open up, the listener makes of it what he can.

The fluidity and intimacy of radio requires imagination, concentration, and active, continuous interpretation from the listener. More important, because a radio play is, by nature of its sensory limitations, open-ended, the listener himself has active control over what he takes away. Because radio is not as compulsive a medium as television or the stage, the listener exercises extensive powers of consent to his own participation in the emotions and ideas of a radio play. When Pinter chose to write Dwarfs for radio he exploited these questions to create a more fascinating, many-sided protagonist, and to raise more complex and interesting questions about human consciousness than could ever be explored in the stage versions.

The Dwarfs is a classic of its kind—and its kind is radio. When it is transformed from print into performance, it should be heard, not seen—presented to an audience who listens. (p. 411)