Mr. Pinter's central figure is a sanitary- engineering tycoon by
the name of Disson and we may assume that his hygienic, if sterile, mission is a civilising one: 'We make more bidets than anyone else in England!' He is a cleanser. He purges society of its waste products, But, expectedly, the naughty Old Unconscious just won't go down the drain.
Indeed, Lear-like, he proceeds at once to divide his kingdom and misjudge his women. He. invites his glossy new brother-in-law, whom he has scarcely met, to take up a senior position with a desk in the office next to his and then, pompously applying an old dogma to a new situation, 'that work can be done and dignity achieved,' insists that the double doors be kept closed between them, which doesn't help his paranoiac sense of isolation; shortly afterwards he lets his wife act as this man's secretary. Mean- while, on the very eve of marriage, he has hired the lusciously provocative Wendy to share his own office and, as it turns out, to stimulate his anguished lust. Evidently he 'bath ever but slenderly known himself.' At least his ensuing nightmare is largely predetermined. The new elements in his situation do not so much create
or develop the action as echo and rather doubt- fully elucidate what is already there. Play-wise, the characters carry, implications in excess of any established facts. The focus blurs confusingly between his world and theirs. In the end, morally blind to his own life, he suffers from conversion-
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