According to a letter from Pinter to The Times Literary Supplement, where it was first published and advertised, that publication's "advertisement... stat that the play was 'inspired' by trip to Turkey with Arthur Miller and is a "parable about torture and the fate of the Kurdish people"... ... assertions... made without consultation with the author "; he continues: "The first part of the sentence is in fact true. The play is not, however, 'about the fate of the Kurdish people' and, above all it is not intended as a 'parable'." As Grimes points out, "Pinter evidently believes his political plays are too direct to be seen as metaphors or parables". As Pinter insists in that letter, the text has more universal relevance: "this play is not about the Turks and the Kurds. I mean, throughout history, many languages have been banned––the Irish have suffered, the Welsh have suffered and the Urdu and the Estonians' language banned." The dialogue does contain some identifiably contemporary British or Western cultural references, thereby showing its applicability to the Great Britain of the present, but the text of the play contains no explicit geographical place setting and no explicit time setting, rendering its setting in place and time simultaneously indeterminate and thus also broadly relevant.
Characters
The play involves four main characters: a Young Woman, an Elderly Woman, a Hooded Man and an unnamed Prisoner. These characters are in stark contrast to the Officer, Sergeant and guards of the prison where the Hooded Man and the Prisoner are captives.
Although Pinter says that he himself has always disliked agitprop in the theatre, finding it an "insult" to his "intelligence," he is aware of "'that great danger, this great irritant to an audience' of 'agit-prop'" that his own overtly political plays like One for the Road and Mountain Language pose.
In 1996, the play Mountain Language was to be performed by Kurdish actors of the Yeni Yasam company in Harringey. The actors obtained plastic guns and military uniforms for the rehearsal. But a worried observer alarmed the police, which lead to an intervention by the police with about 50 police officers and a helicopter. The Kurdish actors were detained and forbidden to speak in Kurdish language. After s short time, the police realized they have been informed of the performance being played in Harrington, and allowed the performance to go ahead.
