According to Michael Billington, theatre critic and one of the most prominent experts on post-World War II British drama and Pinter's biographer, The Hothouse is one of the best plays by Harold Pinter (1930-2008), the classic author of modern drama and a Nobel Prize winner. After writing The Hothouse in the winter of 1958 and following the initial commercial failure of The Birthday Party, Pinter put the play aside. It was only in 1979 that he slightly rewrote it and directed its first production at Hampstead Theatre, where it opened on 24 April 1980. It was soon transferred to many theatres in Europe and worldwide, and a television version was made by the BBC in 1982 .
The Hothouse is one of the few Pinter's political plays. In his reaction to the paranoid climate of the Cold War which was at its highest and most poignant while he wrote the play, the author uses a black satirical-comical language. The play is set in an enigmatic institution where experiments concerning human reaction to various stimuli are being conducted. Many productions of The Hothouse presented the institution as a psychiatric hospital in which a group of scientists perform chilling experiments on their inmates stripped off their personal names and identities and labelled by their serial numbers only. Dramatic action is set in motion by an inmate’s death which, in the course of the play, turns out to be a murder.
Written in a style of a thriller, the play alternates extremely comic situations with scenes of horrifying mental and verbal violence. The play has a solid structure of a classic Ibsenian drama leading to a revelation that the hothouse is a government institution in which state administration disguised as 'science' exerts control over people, most notably of their mind and emotions.
However, The Hothouse is not just a play on physical violence; admittedly this takes place somewhere in the background and can be surmised and guessed about, but we never see it. What we see in the foreground is a cynical control over people and an anatomy of power conducted with a surgical precision. This makes The Hothouse perhaps even more topical and up-to-date now than it was when it was first written. Ours is the society ruled by overall control, we live in a paranoid atmosphere of omnipresent regulation in which one feels that there is nowhere to hide from the control exerted by corporations and various legal and illegal security agencies. We are guinea pigs in experiments of which we know nothing let alone who conducts them. So, what happens, when control evades any regulation and becomes utterly arbitrary, an act of an individual's decision? This is exactly what The Hothouse is about. It meanders resourcefully between humour and a powerful dramatic suspense, between a comedy, thriller and a horror story, making it a most relevant metaphor of our here and now.