Five years into the new century, a playwright who certainly helped shape the theatre of the last quarter of the 20th century, and remains a major voice, has been deservedly, and definitively, honoured, writes Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent
The awarding of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature to the British dramatist Harold Pinter is both inspired, and timely, coming as it does four days after his 75th birthday and late in a remarkable career, spanning works such as The Birthday Party (1958), The Caretaker (1960 )and The Homecoming (1965) to Mountain Language (1988) and Ashes to Ashes (1996).
Sometimes dismissed as a political gesture, rather than an artistic endorsement of the recipient's work, the Nobel Literature Prize has since its inception frequently proved controversial.
Pinter, artist and conscience, the first British winner since novelist William Golding in 1983, has more than earned his victory. His subversive, layered plays, for all their savage black absurdist comedy, are pitched close to the epicentre of human darkness. With the sole exception of his master, Samuel Beckett, no writer has said more with fewer words than Pinter.
If the influence of Beckett has proved vital, so too has the literary presence of an earlier giant alert to injustice, Kafka. While the young Pinter claimed he was a non-political writer, and did not formally describe himself as "politically committed" until the 1980s, he always had a political response. The son of working class East London Jews, he experienced racist jibes, and having been evacuated during the war, returned to London where newsreel footage introduced him to horrors of the concentration camps. By the age of 18, he had already twice been in trouble for refusing to do his National Service.
Harold Pinter has always known his own mind - and heart. He believes in individual and cultural freedom.
Pinter the man can be charming and taciturn; often difficult, he is usually intriguing.
As a master playwright, he is challenging, provocative, courageous, and gut- wrenchingly funny.
Small wonder that many of the world's finest comedians will, when asked, point to Pinter as their mentor.
Such is his vision, he explores the profundity in the banal, and has grasped both the menace and meaning of silence.
