Chilean-American writer Ariel Dofrman (Death and the Maiden) sent this out the day after Pinter's death:

From that very first play, I felt that Harold Pinter was unfolding a world that was deeply political. Not in the overt sense (as would happen later, beginning in the early '80s, in several of his dramas) that his creatures were affected by who governed them, whether this or that man controlled the army or gave orders to the police. No, these figments of Pinter's psyche, at least back in the '60s, did not care to dispute the public arena, were uninterested in changing the world for better or for worse. They were, on the contrary, sad citizens of intimacy, obsessed only with their own survival.

And yet, by trapping us inside the lives of those men and women, Pinter was revealing the many gradations and degradations of power with a starkness I had not noticed before in other authors who were supposedly dedicated to examining or denouncing contingent politics. All power, all domination and liberation started there, he seemed to be saying, in those claustrophobic rooms where each word counts, each slight utterance needs to be accounted for, is paid for in some secret currency of hope or suffering. You want to free the world, humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that it is in language where the other parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.

Washington Post
27Dec08 (The World Harold Pinter Unlocked)

Good depth in this, and I am reminded of the many Pinter plays I acted and directed. Pinter seemed to come out of Beckett for many of us, in the sense of a darker language trapped inside the already trapped Beckettian clowns. Pinter's characters were drawn from a more modern feel, cops and oppressed, Stanley in the Birthday Party interrogated by brutes.
And the terrific run of plays, Old Times, with the two women and the man seemingly meandering over their lives backward and forward, lost; or the strange power of the Homecoming, with the pivotal feminine presence disrupting and haunting the old males of the husband's family. Power, yes, Dorfman gets this right. One of the greatest evenings I spent in the theater was a production of Moonlight at the Roundabout in NYC, with Jason Robards as a dying man and Blythe Danner as his caring though sometimes unfaithful wife. Robards' great vocal ability came forth from his death bed, and the sleek Danner was ravishing in her feminine care for him. At the other split of the stage, their children were sizing up their own situation, in another world. An angelic daughter lights up the latter part of the piece.
At a time when chaos and disorder keep recurring, where wars are endlessly fought and lost, where kidnapping and abuse of power are rampant, Pinter reminds us how we use language to exert power or control, to stymie and erode another's freedoms. But ultimately, the poetry of Pinter's dark works also ties us to the beauty of honest expression, the truth of the human condition, seen from the unique Pinteresque viewpoint.