ABSTRACT
It had been five seemingly long years since Pinter had written a full-length play, The Homecoming, and it would be another five before the next, Old Times, appeared. In the interim he wrote one pair of one-acts, Tea Party and The Basement, followed by another, Landscape and Silence, the two plays that would separate his early work from the next phase. While Tea Party and The Basement retain the early work’s primary focus on dominant/subservient relations, Landscape and Silence almost sever him from that concern entirely, turning in his work to what have been called the memory plays, a term which Pinter during a 1988 public interview, agreed was apt.1
