Pinter's progress

Britain's greatest living playwright turns 70 tomorrow. David Benedict presents the A to Z of Harold Pinter.

Atmosphere: Harold Pinter's intensely theatrical writing whips up palpable tension. Undercurrents rise to create a highly charged atmosphere between the actors which floods and envelops the audience like dry ice. This is why the plays tend not to work on television, where the atmosphere hits the lens and falls dead, leaving the viewer fatally detached.

Birthday Party, The: Pinter's first full-length drama was written in 1958 while he was acting in a tour of Doctor in the House, and it played to excellent notices and full houses out of town. But London critics dumped on it. Just seven people attended the Thursday matinee, one of them Pinter, who still has the box-office receipts. It closed on the first Saturday. The next day, Harold Hobson's now legendary, career-making review appeared - a lone, positive voice, he predicted that the play "will be heard again."

Its first revival featured Alan Ayckbourn and a 1960 television version won 11 million viewers and critical cheers.

B is also for Betrayal, arguably his best play - so far.

Cricket: Keen on table tennis as a lad, Pinter played as a football centre forward (one of his first jobs as a radio actor was in Focus on Football Pools) and was a good sprinter, but his real passion is cricket.

David Baron: In 1954, with success not knocking on his door, jobbing actor Pinter changed his name to David Baron and did four years of weekly rep, from Whitby Spa to Torquay and Palmers Green via Eastbourne, where his baroque but dingy digs were later re-imagined as the setting of The Birthday Party.

He'd already changed his name before, at 20. Poetry London published two poems by Harold Pinta, a temporary re-spelling as a result of his aunt's conviction that the family descended from the distinguished Portuguese Da Pintas.

Engel, Susan: In May 1957 drama student Susan Engel appeared in Pinter's first play, The Room. Two months later he stayed at her flat. One night, she persuaded him to meet literary agent Jimmy Wax, who listened to them reading the play in Engel's kitchen. A week later he took Pinter on as a client. The two men spoke every day for 26 years until Wax's death in 1983. Engel is now a leading actress.

Fraser, Lady Antonia: In 1981, after a loudly reported five-year affair, Pinter married the biographer Antonia Fraser, ex-wife of Tory MP Hugh Fraser and daughter of Lord Longford. It catapulted them to the top of the so-called "chattering classes." Ironically, his friends agree that he has little small talk. At parties he has been known to quote reams of poetry by such unlikely suspects as Webster and Dryden.

Gielgud, Sir John: The supremely poetic John Gielgud seemed like strange casting for No Man's Land, but his performance was a triumph. Pinter writes supremely well for actors, who love his work because he has a complete understanding of, and innate confidence in, the actor's ability to flesh out the subtext. This is partly why his characters don't resort to superficial, over-simplified explanation.

Hackney: Pinter was born and bred at 19 Thistlewaite Rd. He attended Hackney Downs Grammar School, as did Steven Berkoff seven years later.

Ireland: He toured Ireland for almost two years with the last great actor/manager Anew Mcmaster and, under his aegis, fell in love with the country, its writers and one of his leading ladies (Pauline Flanagan).

Jewishness: "I do not at any point, in any way whatsoever, think of myself as a Jewish writer, except that I happen to be a Jew who writes," he asserted in 1960 in the Jewish Chronicle in response to accusations made by an angry Arnold Wesker, the playwright. Although he has no faith, his cultural Judaism as a quasi-outsider underpins his writing.

Kurds: In February this year, a group of Kurdish refugees finally won £155,000 ($535,000) after the ridiculous bungle of 1996 when police raided a rehearsal of Pinter's Mountain Language on the grounds of suspected terrorism, arrested them and forbade them to speak their own language. The play is about the persecution of people who refuse to stop using their own language.

Landscape: His haunting 1968 drama occasioned a major rift when he gave the lead to Peggy Ashcroft rather than his then wife, Vivien Merchant, who had until then created his leading female roles. Merchant - whose real name was Ada Thompson - married him in Bournemouth in 1956, accidentally on Yom Kippur.

Murphy: After spotting an excerpt of Samuel Beckett's Watt in a magazine, Pinter scoured libraries for more, but Beckett was a low priority for librarians in 1951. Eventually tracking down a copy of Murphy, unread since 1938, in Bermondsey Reserve Public Library, he nicked it ... and still has it. Should he be reclassified alongside Genet and Orton as a Criminal Dramatist? He finally met Beckett in 1961 when The Caretaker was in Paris. They raced round in Beckett's rackety Citroen visiting bar after bar, after which the playwright provided Pinter with a packet of bicarbonate of soda.

Nazis: Ashes to Ashes dealt in images from Nazi Germany, although Pinter strongly denies it was about Nazism. In 1958, he wrote: "Meaning begins in the words, in the action, continues in your head and ends nowhere ... meaning which is resolved, parcelled, labelled and ready for export is dead, impertinent - and meaningless."

Old Times: His 1970 screenplay The Go-Between, starring Julie Christie, precisely followed L. P. Hartley's original novel by opening with the highly Pinteresque line: "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." His next play, the masterly Old Times, examined similar themes of past and present and the conceits and deceits of memory.

Pause: "The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear ... we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and what takes place is a continual evasion." The notorious pauses should be electrified held moments, not portentous silences. The director's and actors' job is to fill each pause with clear intent by working out who's in control: the one who has just spoken or the next speaker, in other words: "Whose pause is it, anyway?"

Quiller Memorandum, The: His chilly screen version of Elleston Trevor's spy novel about neo-Nazis. He has written 22 screenplays, including Joseph Losey's classic The Servant, Accident, Langrishe, Go Down and The French Lieutenant's Woman. A handful of scenes in The Remains of the Day are his - the rest was rewritten when Columbia moved the project from Mike Nichols to Merchant/Ivory. He turned down Straw Dogs . One of his most cherished projects - which he later described as "the best working year of my life" - was his unproduced 1972 Proust screenplay, A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, which will finally see the light of day this year ... on stage at London's National Theatre.

Room, The: His first play sprang partially from his visit to a house in Chelsea shared by two men, the more talkative of whom was the late Quentin Crisp.

Seventy: His age tomorrow, his birthday. Twenty-nine plays so far. No signs of stopping.

The actual birthday party: There will be a birthday party for Pinter today, hosted by Faber, his publisher. The invitation stipulates "no presents."

Ulysses: As a teenager, Pinter developed a taste for modernism. He remembers his father took exception to Joyce's then notorious novel, refusing to have "a book like that in the same room where my mother served dinner."

Vanilla: A short-lived show he directed in 1990. Jane Stanton Hitchcock's intermittently hilarious and outlandish satire centred on the excesses of South American dictatorships as exemplified by Miralda Sumac, a woman not a million miles from Imelda Marcos.

Woolf: A lifelong friend, Henry Woolf commissioned, produced, directed and acted in Pinter's first play, in 1957. It was for the Bristol University Drama Department and took place in a converted squash court.

X marks the spot: This former East End Jewish boy who grew up amid fascism is a natural socialist, but he voted for Thatcher in the 1979 election in protest at a strike at the National Theatre: "The most shameful act of my life."

Yorkshire Cricket Club: Pinter is a lifetime supporter.

Zzzz: Pinter's plays are very hard to do well. Badly performed, Pinter is baffling, unendurable and sleep-inducing. The good productions, however, remind you of the matchless power of theatrical economy.

- INDEPENDENT