The New Elizabethans: Sixty Portraits of our Age. James Naughtie

The Birthday Party was quite conventional in form, he was indeed telling his audiences, even then, that they were going to get something more than they were used to. Much later he said: ‘I couldn’t any longer stay in the room with this bunch of people who opened doors and came in and went out.’ So onto the stage came people who didn’t obey the rules of theatrical naturalism, sometimes hardly seemed to move, but instead conducted conversations (and held pauses) that were games of hide and seek in which they tried each other out, ran for cover, and were often driven by obsessions and fears that remained mysterious in every way except in their power to disturb and isolate those who felt them.

      In The Caretaker he examines the relationship between a man who has had mental upheavals and the tramp he befriends. We’re not sure who’s really in charge. In The Homecoming the family around which the play revolves has unresolved misunderstandings and fears that condemn each of its members to a different kind of limbo. Two of his films with Joseph Losey, The Servant in 1963 and Accident in 1967, poke away at a British class system that gave Pinter, the son of London Jewish parents, a great deal of entertainment but also plenty of anger. Who is controlling whom, and how does it work? This was a question that could never fully be answered, one of the most common feelings for a Pinter audience, whom he was always challenging.

      His dramatic grip on audiences in the sixties was produced by the penumbra of mystery that seemed to surround every text, and by his meticulous language, pared down to its skeletal minimum. Conversation was tight, controlled like a fugue, so that patterns repeated themselves and new ideas always changed the shape of the whole. And then there were the pauses. It was obvious that Pinter would become the butt of many jokes about silence, because no one used it quite like he did, and he turned it into a fingerprint on any script. His biographer Michael Billington tells the story of a conversation with the actor Michael Hordern in which Pinter, as director, was giving his notes to the cast after a rehearsal: points he wanted them to note, changes he wanted made. He explained to Hordern how he saw the silent beats in one line, and said: ‘I wrote dot, dot, dot and you gave me dot, dot.’ The point of the story, Billington says, is that Hordern, as an actor who had understood Shakespearean rhythms all his life, knew immediately the difference between a short pause and the long pause that Pinter was trying to capture.

      In struggling for survival, which is what so many of his characters are doing, language is both the battleground and the place of safety. There are weapons to be forged, deceptions to be practised: in his play Old Times in 1971 we’re never told which of the three characters is telling the truth about the past (if any is). None of this would matter if Pinter was writing in an abstract way about deep feelings that are never properly revealed: there would be no drama, and not even six people at the Thursday matinée. But the reason that he cast a spell on so many audiences was that he understood the nature of dramatic tension: that there is not much fun in not knowing something, unless you suspect that it is sufficiently menacing or dangerous to matter. You have to care.

      By the end of the sixties Pinter was the leading English dramatist to make the final break with the cosy past that John Osborne had first confronted with Look Back in Anger in the fifties, and had created a language which was his own. In a later play like Betrayal, in 1978, he caught perfectly the struggle of two upper-middle-class people to cope with the fallout of an affair and to try to settle who is the greater betrayer. The play, inspired by his own seven-year affair with Joan Bakewell, distils the excitements and the nightmare of the consequences into conversation in which everything that is said points to a much deeper argument that is kept out of the room but is always knocking at the door.

      It wasn’t surprising that Pinter should use this affair to make drama, because his own life had become increasingly public. He didn’t like it, but acknowledged that in a way he was asking for it. Of his failed marriage to the actress Vivien Merchant – they wed in 1956 and she died of alcoholism in 1982 – he said: ‘While she was alive, if you think about it, so much of my work was about unhappy frozen married relationships.’ He got out of his own by falling in love, in 1975, with Lady Antonia Fraser, writer, daughter of the eccentric Labour peer Lord Longford, member of a famous Catholic family, and wife of a right-wing Conservative MP.