“Literary figures have no pre-history. It is said that a theatre director who was staging one of Harold Pinter's plays asked the playwright for some hints as to what his characters were up to before they came on stage. Pinter's reply was 'Mind your own fucking business.’”

What should be noticed especially here is the same kind of leaping to conclusions and the same air of absolute confidence in the rightness of these conclusions that characterize commentators on the play. Pinter is using Ben and Gus to mirror his audience.

“That it is the killers who now are threatened may be ironic, but their security can no more be assumed than any other man’s.”

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.