Blake Morrison's review of The Hothouse was published in the TLS of May 9, 1980.

I wrote The Hothouse in the winter of 1958. I put it aside for further deliberation and made no attempt to have it produced at the time. I then went on to write The Caretaker. In 1979 I re-read The Hothouse and decided it was worth presenting on the stage. I made a few cuts but no changes.

Not exactly a new Pinter, then, nor a revival, but a play he thought better of. And not one he can have totally forgotten, either, whatever his programme note might imply: a section of The Hothouse (the interrogation of Lamb) was lifted out to become a sketch in its own right, "Applicant", in 1964; and Pinter allowed the original manuscript of The Hothouse to be seen by Martin Esslin, who describes the play in detail in his study The Peopled Wound, suggesting that it "was discarded because its author realised his future lay in the area of realism". Not quite unfamiliar territory, but an event neverthekess and a chance to be clearer about the shape of Pinter's development.

The Hothouse is set in an institution whose nature is never entirely made known to us (the staff refer to "patients", and use the terms "rest home" and "convalescent home") but which seems to be that of a mental hospital. The patients are known by numbers, not names, and remain offstage; the staff, in their grey suits and impersonal surroundings, are the only people we see. Roote, the director (an ex-army man), Gibbs, his immediate subordinate, Miss Cutts, their mistress, and Lush, a man in his thirties – these are the four principal characters and during the day and evening of the action much of their time is taken up in investigating two mysteries: the death of patient 6457 abd the birth of a child to patient 6459. Suspicion is centred on a fifth character, Lamb, as innocent-seeming as the name suggests; blame, after a debacle in which all but one of the staff are massacred by the patients, officially falls on Roote; but Gibbs might also be guilty – we are never sure, nor meant to be.

Pinter's play isn't really the thriller which such a plot summary is in danger of making it sound to be; nor is it the "grotesque fantasy" populated by "gargoyles rather than human beings" which Martin Esslin led us to suppose. In the Hampstead production, directed by Pinter himself, there's a marvellously substantial perforamnce of Roote by Derek Newark, with good support from James Grant as Gibbs. The other actors are less successful in bringing out the play's comedy: Robert East has a nice line in languorous, exasperated stares but seems too dry and genteel for the part of Lush, which should have something of the suppressed violence of Mick in The Caretaker and Foster in No Man's Land; Roger Davidson isn't quite confidently unconfident enough as Lamb; and Angela Pleasance as the sexy-but-sadistic Miss Cutts ("You like to get your hands round someone's neck", Gibbs accuses her) is a bit sub-Tutin.

Pinter criticism, largely because of its preoccupation with silence and absence, has overlooked the extent to which his plays are about power. Roote, like Hirst in No Man's Land, maintains his authority only precariously: he tyrannizes, worries about failing strength, insists on being called "Sir" and not being called "Colonel" (except by the head porter, Tubb) and is paranoid that the patients do not like him and that the staff are "taking the piss". His inferiors, like Davies in The Caretaker (on which this play inevitably sheds some light) are not sure where they stand with him, how far they can go, when they may overstep the mark ("Don't think I can't squash you on a plate as easy as look at you", Roote warns Lush). The hothouse of the title has something to do with questions of power and pressure: Roote is feeling the heat; he also makes life hot for others. So, too, in the interrogation sequence, Gibbs and Miss Cutts give Lamb a grilling or roasting.

Lamb's name has other associations. However subtly edited by late Pinter, The Hothouse remains early Pinter, and as such enjoys playing with a symbolic framework. The action takes place on Christmas Day, and ther are several references to Easter; a child is born, a man dies, a father is sought; Lamb is accused and tried, Roote speaks of himself as a "delegate" of some higher power. The Christian references are lightly handled but as typical of early Pinter as the harsh monosyllabic names (Roote, Gibbs, Lush, Hogg, Beck, Budd, Tuck, Dodds, Tate and Pett), the heavy use of alliteration and euphony ("It's a Christmas cake, Colonel, cooked by the cook"), and the note of social protest against bureaucratic depersonalization. Some of the play's elements are indeed early to the point of naivety – the numbers-not-names idea, for instance, and the surreal offstage noises – and others aren't fully integrated: it's easy to see why the interrogation with electrodes (here literally boxed off from the rest of the action) was taken out to make another play. But early Pinter, even bottom-drawer Pinter, is worth the mature, top-drawer work of just about anyone else around, and The Hothouse more than justifies its retrieval.

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