Eventually Roote gets his come-uppance at the hands of his deputy Gibbs a part Mr Pinter might have preferred had he been a few years younger.

ECONOMIST: From the archive

And now in "The Hothouse", written in 1958 but not staged until 1980, Mr Pinter plays the coarsest character of them all, Roote, the corrupt head of an indeterminate institution where the inmates and the staff are exploited to the point of torture and death, a theme he was to develop in a sparer and more political way in his later "Mountain Language".

ECONOMIST: From the archive