Playwrights tend to start out political and end up personal. Harold Pinter appeared to follow the opposite course. Marrying continental absurdism with British popular comedy, he changed how dialogue was written in British theatre as definitively as Cézanne changed how paintings were painted in France. Complementing his dialogue, his great speeches turn the mundane (in No Man's Land, the one-way system around London's Bolsover Street) into poetry. Despite this, those of us who followed him rejected his elliptical style and what we saw as the solipsistic apoliticism of absurdism ("Nothing means anything, nothing can be done"). So it was a surprise when, in later life, Pinter became a prominent voice of political dissent.
That is the conventional view, and there's a lot to it. But it underestimates the political power of the earlier work. Before Pinter, what was said between the words of English plays tended to be suppressed emotion, what individuals denied about themselves. From Pinter onwards, the pauses were about cruelty and menace - what self-satisfied 1950s Britain denied about itself. When I directed The Caretaker at school, the only explanatory quotation in the programme was: "What are my plays about? The weasel under the cocktail cabinet."
Pinter's early plays - some set around the cocktail cabinet, but mostly among the weasels - now look less like British absurdism and more like a portrait of a corroding social structure. What remains shocking about The Homecoming (in which a genteel American woman allows herself to be pimped by her brother's demi-mondaine family) is the selfish cruelty that lies behind the monstrous chutzpah of its characters.
The producer and critic Michael Kustow has claimed Pinter's Jewishness as the link between his exposure of weasel words in his plays and weasel politicians in his polemic. First politicised by postwar British antisemitism, Pinter has been berated by the belligerati (Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen) for his views on US action in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq. He was wrong to defend Milosevic, but his supposed anti-Americanism was rooted in his belief that, while everybody knew about communist crimes, US support for rightwing dictatorships was ignored.
In his Nobel prize acceptance speech, Pinter seems to distinguish between his earlier uncertainty as an artist ("there are no hard distinctions between what is real and unreal") and his newfound commitment as a citizen ("I must ask: What is true? What is false?"). His later work continued to address contemporary Britain: Mountain Language was provoked by infringements of British civil liberties that appear paltry today, and his observation that torturers seek moral reassurance from the tortured (in 1984's One for the Road) is given added weight by the torturer's Britishness.
But the earlier, greater plays have their own certainty. Michael Billington points out how Pinter dethroned the idea of the all-knowing author (telling an actor who inquired about a character's background: "Mind your own bloody business"), and modish postmodernists have used this to claim Pinter's work as evidence for the end of writerly coherence. In fact, Pinter will be remembered for doing what postmodernism claims you can't do any more: create a complete and consistent imagined world. His dialogue and great speeches glow with the confidence of an author in command. That the imagined world of his plays says so much about the actual Britain in which he wrote them is proof the weasels were real.
David Edgar, a playwright and president of the Writers' Guild.