It was in early 1974, while Harold Pinter was in America and working on a screen adaption of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, that the originating image of No Man’s Land occurred to him:

I remember, I was sitting in this taxi and I actually saw two people sitting in a room and one of them was about to pour the other one a drink and he said: ‘As it is?’ and the other character said: ‘As it is, yes please, absolutely as it is.’... It’s the way I think writing – in my case, dramatic fiction – works. You have to follow the clue of what you’re given ... to have a donnée, a given fact. If I don’t have that, I’m in the desert.