“Although Harold Pinter once said that his plays were about “the weasel under the cocktail cabinet,”a recent interviewer claims that Pinter considers this remark meaningless and made it only “to frustrate this line of inquiry.” That it was intended to be cryptic
is entirely possible, but that it is meaningless is doubtful; for, what-ever Pinter’s intentions, this metaphor suggests much that is central to his work […].
INTERVIEWER. There’s a sense of terror and a threat of violence in most of your plays. Do you see the world as an essentially violent place?
PINTER. The world is a pretty violent place, it’s as simple as that, so any violence in the plays comes out quite naturally. It seems to me an essential and inevitable factor”.
Pinter
A collection of critical essays
edited by Arthur Ganz
1961
