Considered by critics the earliest example of Pinter's "comedy of menace", this play has strong similarities to Pinter's second play, The Birthday Party, including features considered hallmarks of Pinter's early work and of the so-called Pinteresque: dialogue that is comically familiar and yet disturbingly unfamiliar, simultaneously or alternatingly both mundane and frightening; subtle yet contradictory and ambiguous characterizations; a comic yet menacing mood characteristic of mid-twentieth-century English tragicomedy; a plot featuring reversals and surprises that can be both funny and emotionally moving; and an unconventional ending that leaves at least some questions unresolved.
"[2] The bedsit is located in an equally rundown rooming house which, like that of Pinter's next play, The Birthday Party, becomes the scene of a visitation by apparent strangers.
The play ends violently when Bert returns, finds Rose stroking Riley's face, delivers a long sexually-suggestive monologue about his experience driving his van while referring to it as if it was a woman, and then beats Riley until he appears lifeless, possibly murdering him, after which Rose cries "Can't see.
It was written over four afternoons and late nights while Pinter was playing in Rattigan's Separate Tables at the Pavilion Theatre, Torquay, in November 1956.
The Room, as the play was called, was eventually staged by the Bristol Drama Department in May 1957 in a converted squash-court and in a production by Woolf himself" (66–67).
The original production featured the following cast: The play was presented later at the Hampstead Theatre Club on 21 January 1960 as part of a double bill with The Dumb Waiter.
[7] On 26 May 2007 students at the University of Bristol, directed by Simon Reade, mounted a production in the original performance space – a converted "squash-court" as described by Billington (67) – which was recorded by the British Library Sound Archive.