Pinter's unique use of the English language has generated much interest in his plays among critics and theatre-goers. His plays portray lonely, frightened characters that reveal their uncertainty in their speech: the unfinished sentence, the inexplicable silence, the awkward pause, and the self-contradiction. All characters, moreover, use language as a weapon to dominate, possess, intimidate and even destroy an individual. He captures the everyday, casual idiom and presents it truthfully, with all its tautologies, repetitiveness, and grammatical incorrectness. Consequently, long speeches are rare and consist of brief sentences. Pinter also uses to good effect the ‘pause’ and ‘silence’ as linguistic tools. His characters communicate even in the absence of language, symbolically, through seemingly irrelevant, insignificant, and compulsively repetitive actions.
