Julio Martino, North East
Pinter is undeniably one of the greatest living dramatists. But will his plays survive him? His great plays of the 60s, for example, are recognisably of the 60s. Do you think they will beome period pieces, or will they remain open for fresh interpretations by future generations of readers, theatre-goers and theatre makers?

Michael Billington
Pinter's plays obviously belong to their era, The Birthday Party is of the late 1950s, The Caretaker and The Homecoming belong to the 1960s and there are references to that world. And yet his plays make total sense when they're revived nearly 50 years later. I don't see any contradiction or paradox in this. I think all plays operate on two levels. They are both expressions of the time in which they are written and they're expressions of eternal truths in human behaviour and that applies any first rate writer. So I don't think Pinter's plays will date in the sense you mean. I think they will be available down the decades because they're dealing with qualities in human life, particularly insecurity, uncertainty, fear and terror that remain permanent.

Adrian Fear, London
In the pantheon of great British playwrights where would you place Pinter and why?

Michael Billington
I don't compile lists of playwrights in batting order. You have to start with Shakespeare out in front anyway and the rest following on a distance behind which I think Pinter would be the first to acknowledge. I would rate Pinter highly as one of the great 20th-century playwrights not just in Britain but everywhere else for several reasons. He helped redefine the nature of theatre. He demolished an idea of the omniscient author. What Pinter did was to show that the dramatist is someone who can present exciting evidence and then leave it to the audience to deduce what that evidence actually means. Secondly, I think, Pinter did revolutionise speech in British theatre and language. Before Pinter there was something called poetry and there was something called prose. Poetry was always heightened and rather flowery and occupied so many words per line and prose was rather drab and flat. Pinter's fantastic achievement, I think, was to create a prose poetry of his own and to take the ordinary speech of everyday and bring out its poetic quality, its rhythms, its repetitions, its hesitations, its sudden flowerings into ecstatic speech.

I suppose thirdly what Pinter did, was to create archetypal characters on stage. Figures like Davies the tramp in The Caretaker or Max, the bullying patriarch, in The Homecoming embody something much larger themselves. Davies becomes an archetype for a man who is both persecuted and a persecutor and Max becomes a prototype of the head of the household who is riddled with sexual and emotional insecurity. He creates huge characters on the stage. I would simply say his work will live on whether he occupies number five or number seven in the batting order.

Tim Evans, London
Pinter was influenced early on by Samuel Becket, and in a sense their writing and style have been paralleld. Do you think a new generation of writers influenced in turn by Pinter can continue this style of the unexplained, and still maintain an originality, without the label of Pinteresque?

Michael Billington
I think there was a dangerous period in the 1960s when imitators of Pinter were everywhere, in fact one critic dubbed them the Pinteretti. Everyone seemed to be writing sub-Pinter dialogue full of unfinished sentences and unexplained evasions. I think we're through that period. I think the younger generation of British dramatists all acknowledge Pinter's influence and power and all admire his work. I'm speaking of figures like Patrick Marber who's directed Pinter's plays and of Mark Ravenhill and indeed the late Sarah Kane who was very close to Pinter and very fond of him. But I think they have found a voice of their own and I think have managed to absorb Pinter without simply reproducing them.

Heathcliff Blair, Roehampton
It has been said about both Pinter and Stanley Kubrick that part of the pleasure of their work comes from never quite knowing what is going on. This could be said about many other artists from working or lower middle-class backgrounds of that generation. Did this invigorating dramatic ambiguity arise solely from the influence of Beckett and Brecht, or from a more liberal post-war culture that, at last, trusted the likes of Pinter to invite audiences to think for themselves? Today, it seems that such invitations are actually regarded by critics as patronising - a stance more Orwellian than Pinteresque.

Michael Billington
Your question is getting at something very important. I think the arrival of Pinter's work in the late 1950s and through the 60s and onwards coincides with an important cultural shift. What Pinter understood is that we are living at a time when there are no answers to questions about human motivation and behaviour. When we do not expect dramatic situations to be resolved. When we didn't expect plays or works of art to provide us with solutions.

To a large extent Beckett had anticipated this with a play like Waiting for Godot in 1955 which presents humanity looking for an answer to life's problems and meaning and not finding it. Brecht, I think, is a red herring in this context, he is totally different in that Brecht does provide social solutions to human problems. But it's very interesting that Pinter's work emerges in the early 1960s at a time when the cinema and fiction were also exploring doubt and ambiguity. There was a famous film by Antonioni, called La Venturra, which came out around the same time as The Birthday Party and The Caretaker. In it a woman goes missing and a group of her friends go in search of her, the film offers no explanation as to what happened to her, you never know whether she committed suicide, you never know whether she chose to disappear or what happened. In the same way Pinter's plays take a human situation and leave it to the audience to supply the answer or the missing information - where does Stanley go at the end of The Birthday Party? We don't know, Pinter does not know, he expects the audience to provide any answer they choose.

Pinter is part of a major shift in culture when first of all works of art do not supply answers and secondly when audiences and spectators take on themselves the responsibility for supplying the information. Briefly, the novelist Paul Auster says that when you're writing the reader is doing the writing with you. Part of the writing experience, and in the same way in the theatre, the spectator is now part of the experience. We would be insulted by modern drama that dotted all the i's and crossed the t's so I think Pinter shows an extraordinary awareness of a shift in narrative style.

Meirion Rice
Do you think Pinter and his work would have been different had he gone to university?

Michael Billington
It's a very interesting hypothetical question. My hunch is he wouldn't have been half as good a playwright if he had gone to university. I'm sure he would have written and I'm sure he would have written plays. Three years of academic discipline might have actually stifled his imagination. The great thing about Pinter's early life is that it combines his experiences of Hackney and the East End, his experiences in Ireland, his peregrinations around the South Coast as a rep actor. Somehow all this emerges and finds shape and form in early plays like The Room and The Birthday Party.

Pinter does not write intellectual plays of ideas, he does not write theoretical plays. He writes plays based directly on experiences of life and my claim is the plays have an absolutely clear connection with Pinter's biography. University might have made Pinter a more cerebral dramatist but not a better one.

Life & Work | Individual Plays | Billington's Biography | Language | Acting | Specific Themes