It's interesting. Before all this flap, I hadn't known much about Pinter except his more recent political writing, but all the things I've read in the past few days about his glorious early work have not changed my opinion much. There are endless admiring web pages of what I like to call "critical fog," wrapping meaning and significance around something that really doesn't seem to have as much of those aspects as advertised.

Pinter's major plays are usually set in a single room, whose occupants are threatened by forces or people whose precise intentions neither the characters nor the audience can define. Often they are engaged in a struggle for survival or identity.

"Pinter's dialogue is as tightly - perhaps more tightly - controlled than verse," Martin Esslin writes in The People Wound (1970). "Every syllable, every inflection, the succession of long and short sounds, words and sentences, is calculated to nicety. And precisely the repetitiousness, the discontinuity, the circularity of ordinary vernacular speech are here used as formal elements with which the poet can compose his linguistic ballet." Pinter refuses to provide rational justifications for action, but offers existential glimpses of bizarre or terrible moments in people's lives. In MONOLOGUE (1973) and NO MAN'S LAND (1975) the characters use words as their weapons in their struggles, not only for survival but also for sanity.

ASTON - You said you wanted me to get you up.
DAVIES - What for?
ASTON - You said you were thinking of going to Sidcup.
DAVIES - Ay, that'd be a good thing, if I got there.
ASTON - Doesn't look like much of a day.
DAVIES - Ay, well, that's shot it, en't it?
(from The Caretaker)

Maybe you had to be there.

I have never seen one of his plays, and will readily concede that perhaps there is some magnitude of sheer genius that has escaped my admittedly recent examination of his work.

None of that changes my judgment that his politics drove the selection a lot more than his work did. It's not like it's a first for the Committee.