IN MAY of 1958 we find, for the first time in The Times, mention of the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005: “An unusually busy week in the London theatre opens tonight with the production at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, of The Birthday Party by a promising young playwright, Mr Harold Pinter . . . The Birthday Party . . . is about a former concert party pianist who, for some obscure reason, is afraid of two commercial travellers who put up at the boarding house at which he is staying . . .”

For some obscure reason — and on we go into the history of literature. Pinter was 23 when Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was first performed in Paris — En attendant Godot. “Nothing to be done,” as Beckett wrote, and so the theatre underwent a sea change.

Pinter’s work, moving into the flow of time, offers a view of a changing, slippery world that is both universal and very English indeed. The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and The Homecoming share a domestic setting and a strange unease within that setting.

Early reviewers weren’t necessarily comfortable with his work. When The Birthday Party was noticed in The Times it was not well received. The drama of Stanley, strangely persecuted at Meg and Petey’s boarding house, left the reviewer cold: “Mr Harold Pinter’s effects are neither comic nor terrifying: they are never more than puzzling, and after a little while we tend to give up the puzzle in despair.”

It’s easy to mock critics who can’t seem to see what’s in front of their eyes, but hindsight is a fine thing.

What Pinter’s theatrical work does is demonstrate the fallibility of memory and the inability of language to convey meaning. “Pinteresque”, like Kafkaesque, has entered the language, and is generally used to convey a sense of peculiar, ordinary menace, speech filled with elliptical pauses, a sense that there’s something going on in the background that no one really gets.

Pinter’s early plays retain their power because they represent, rather than interpret. Every life is full of strangeness. No life is ordinary. It is all in a slant of light and language.

Does Pinter deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature? Certainly. Here is an author who is fully engaged with the world.

Recently, he announced that he would not write any more plays. “I think I’ve written 29 plays,” he told Mark Lawson on the BBC Radio 4 programme Front Row. “I think its it’s enough for me. I think I’ve found other forms now.”

He was speaking of his poetry, with its often vibrant, fully realised language.

His passion for politics has sometimes cost him. He was thrown out of an American embassy function in Turkey 20 years ago for referring to torture instead of simply sipping cocktails; and he has been outspoken of the “war on terror”.

All that . . . and chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club, too. A perfect English winner of literature’s most important prize.

STAGE & SCREEN

PLAYS

The Room (1957)
The Birthday Party (1957)
The Dumb Waiter (1957)
A Slight Ache (1958)
The Hothouse (1958)
The Caretaker (1959)
A Night Out (1959)
Night School (1960)
The Dwarfs (1960)
The Collection (1961)
The Lover (1962)
Tea Party (1964)
The Homecoming (1964)
The Basement (1966)
Landscape (1967)
Silence (1968)
Old Times (1970)
Monologue (1972)
No Man’s Land (1974)
Betrayal (1978)
Family Voices (1980)
Other Places (1982)
A Kind of Alaska (1982)
Victoria Station (1982)
One for the Road (1984)
Mountain Language (1988)
New World Order (1991)
Party Time (1991)
Moonlight (1993)
Ashes to Ashes (1996)
Celebration (1999)
Remembrance of Things Past (2000)

FILMS

The Caretaker (1963)
The Servant (1963)
The Pumpkin Eater (1963)
The Quiller Memorandum (1965)
Accident (1966)
The Birthday Party (1967)
The Go-Between (1969)
The Homecoming (1969)
Langrishe Go Down (1970)
Proust Screenplay (1972)
The Last Tycoon (1974)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1980)
Betrayal (1981)
Victory (1982)
Turtle Diary (1984)
The Handmaid’s Tale (1987)
Heat of the Day (1988)
Reunion (1988)
The Comfort of Strangers (1989)
The Trial (1989)
The Dreaming Child (1997)
The Tragedy of King Lear (2000)

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