Harold Pinter casts a long shadow. Over poetry, over politics, over the theatre, over the texture of the world we live in. He was a giant in an age that lacks them. Through a titanic effort of will he managed to retain his stature and his authority for almost 50 years.

Theatre is a cruel business. It loves to inflate reputations and careers, just as it loves to throw up make-believe worlds from wood and canvas and paint. They sit there for a while looking stable and secure and somehow real. Then they are dismantled with a violent speed, which shames their careful construction, before being chucked in the skip. There is no shortage of heralded and hyped artists whose bubble reputations have burst with the same brutality. Coward, Rattigan, Orton, all dipped in and out of fashion. For Pinter to have retained his Olympian standing for so long is not the least of his achievements.

He used to visit the Bush theatre regularly. One evening he came into the pub beneath the theatre with all his usual prickly charisma crackling around him. A force field of restrained aggression always seemed to tighten the air around him. It was an aura prepared for arenas of competitive status such as the Ivy restaurant, or a theatre first night, or a party of the Great and the Good. But the Bush pub was full of its usual motley of feral junkies, plainclothes coppers and festive Jamaican grandads, and none of them paid him the slightest attention.

I watchd him as he pushed his way through the crush to the bar and ordered a pint. Drink in hand, his shoulders seemed to slump, and all the tension seemed to fall from his face, to be replaced by a simple and lively humility. His whole body seemed to be saying, “Thank God, I don’t have to be Harold Pinter for five minutes.” It was the most eloquent demonstration I’ve ever seen of how non-stop exhausting it must be to hack out a living as a legend.

Not that he could have imagined that destiny ahead of him when he began his life touring England and Ireland as the actor David Baron. He emerged from the same world of weekly rep, seedy digs, lascivious landladies and a trunk full of stock costumes as his near contemporary John Osborne. Although both were written up as the great subversives, destroying the genteel charm and etiolated elegance of the post-war theatre, they both made sure they were thoroughly soaked in that tradition before they started subverting it.

Disciplines of form, theatricality and storytelling were absorbed by both writers and never left them, however far they strayed into the experimental. It might have been hard for Pinter to justify to himself what he was doing when he toured the country as Sir Lancelot Spratt in the theatrical version of Doctor in the House, but he learnt to listen to an audience. When, to keep him above the breadline, friends wrote him into a Sherlock Holmes radio series as a servant who never said anything but “Yes, sir”, he may have wondered whether acting was the right career choice; but he would also have heard in the limitations of radio how important was the music within dialogue.

His early plays are short, sharp and shocking, deadly cocktails of vaudeville and the absurd. The Birthday Party is a lethal blend of patter routines almost out of the music hall, with a nauseous and unsettling sense of danger. It was a deliberate European rethink of a very English situation. The play itself might have died a quiet death, taking the career of its author with it, had not the Sunday Times critic, Harold Hobson, championed it forcefully.

Other of his early works — The Dumb Waiter, The Room, The Lover and many sketches that emerged from the world of revue — all have a cool linear logic and a precise mathematical structure. They suggest a writer limbering up, stretching his muscles and finding out his own strengths. Always canny with his husbandry of his own energies, he did not make the mistake of trying to do more than he was capable of. When he was ready, he unloaded a series of plays that matched anything else written in the past century — The Caretaker, The Homecoming, Landscape, Old Times, No Man’s Land, Betrayal and A Kind of Alaska.

All these plays have absolutely specific locales, densely imagined, yet they all also occupy Pinterland, a separate realm of the imagination. Their language is packed with failed communication and queasy subtexts as characters manoeuvre around each other in search of sexual or territorial domination, like a pack of animals in a nature documentary. The pauses and silences, which have become such a celebrated feature of his work, had been part of theatrical language before, but they had never been so definitely annotated nor so loaded with a dark electricity.

The plays are remarkable also for the absence of actual on-stage deaths and yet simultaneously for the imminent impression of death. This was art from the bomb age, from the era of universal destruction, an age living under the shadow of Hiroshima, the Holocaust and the cold war.

None of these events is directly referenced in Pinter’s work — he drew a proper and sharp distinction between the work of a playwright and the work of a journalist — yet the atmosphere of his plays is drenched in the texture of the life they created. There are no actual fatalities, just an insidious fog sneaking in through the window. You feel the presence of death everywhere in his work, the knock on the door, the noise on the stairs, the unseen character. Yet no one dies, they all just wait.

There are obvious similarities with his near contemporary Samuel Beckett here, but Pinter’s achievement was to root his sense of miasmic dread in the real world. Pinter manages to make large philosophical statements co-exist with minute details of English life, of mugs of tea and great cricket innings, of newsagents and down-at-heel pubs. His achievement is all the greater for it.

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