Martyn Kerry, Ipswich
Pinteresque is an adjective that has passed into common usage. Serious scholars of Kafka would probably baulk at using the term Kafkaesque as the common perception of his work because it is so far removed from the essence of the artist. Is Pinteresque similarly in danger of becoming an irrelevant misnomer?

Michael Billington
I honestly think Pinteresque is one of those pieces of journalistic short hand which eventually will become meaningless. The phrase was commonly used around the 60s and 70s to denote a situation filled with unspecific menace and to refer to dialogue that was full of cryptic evasions. It's now applied as loosely as Kafkaesque is applied to Kafka and it's lost its connection with reality. You could argue that it is perversely flattering for a writer, in his own lifetime, to have achieved his own adjective.

Sean Perrott, Woodford Green, Essex
Sitcoms, such as Steptoe and Son, Rising Damp and Hancock, seem to inhabit similar worlds and share many characteristics of Pinter's work. Did he particularly admire any contemporary working in this field, and was he ever commissioned, or have the desire, to write a sitcom?

Michael Billington
I don't think Pinter ever wished to write a sitcom and to my knowledge he was never asked to. But you've put your finger on a very interesting connection between what was happening in comedy and what was happening in the theatre in the 50s and 60s. Don't forget Pinter did write a lot of review sketches, which have been revived recently and stand up extremely well. Pinter was part of a movement that was redefining comedy and making it much more subversive and eccentric. My own belief is that people like Galton and Simpson, who wrote Steptoe and Son and Hancock were very much aware of what was happening in the theatre and were very conscious of the Osborne/Pinter generation. I was recently listening to the famous Hancock programme on the desolation of an English Sunday. I worked out that it was written not long after John Osborne wrote Look Back in Anger, which is also about the boredom and desolation of an English Sunday. And again Steptoe and Son with its anguished father/son relationship feeds off a lot of the comedy at the time. I think there are all kinds of connections between Pinter and the comic writing of that period and I think he was, in a sense, part of the general movement. I don't think he ever wanted to do sitcom itself because it would have been too restricting a format for him.

Katherine Healy, Northern Ireland
Is Harold Pinter left or right handed?

Michael Billington
Harold Pinter is right handed.

Patrick Hennessy, Hackney
When I was a kid in Worthing, I remember being told that the famous playwright Harold Pinter was living for the summer in a terrace near the Connaught Theatre (we lived down the road so it was very near). When I saw The Birthday Party many years later at the National I took one look and thought "My God this is Worthing in the 1950s - and this is his reaction to it, a bit like John Betjeman inviting friendly bombs to fall on Slough, a lot like mine to Worthing when I was a teenager." So... did Pinter write The Birthday Party while spending the summer in Worthing?

Michael Billington
I think you can safely say Worthing had a big influence on The Birthday Party even if it wasn't actually written there. In fact I think the play is meant to evoke a whole range of those South Coast seaside towns which Pinter had direct experience of. The events that occur in The Birthday Party were actually inspired by something that happened in Eastbourne when he found himself one Sunday evening without any digs. Someone in the pub recommended a house to him and he stayed there a week. He found there was a reclusive lodger who claimed to have once been a pianist and also a landlady who goosed the lodger every morning at breakfast. There was an air of decadent seediness that found its way into the play. Your point is good because I think The Birthday Party is an indication of what English seaside towns were like in the late 1950s. They were, on the one hand, areas of great respectability and fake gentility and at the same time you always felt beneath them there was always something a little shady, something a little shifty, something a little worrying and this was true.

Timothy, Chiswick
Where did Harold Pinter live in the Chiswick High Road when he started to write The Caretaker?

Michael Billington
Pinter wrote The Caretaker while living in a first floor flat in Chiswick High Road at number 373. The events that happen in the play are a fairly close transcription of real events. Pinter and his wife Vivien and their very young son Daniel were living in this very modest two room and there was a kindly man who looked after the flat for his brother, in real life his name was Austin. One day Austin brought a tramp he'd met in a café back to the house and the tramp stayed for two or three weeks. Pinter knew the tramp very slightly and then one day he looked through an open door and saw Austin with his back to the tramp gazing out into the garden and the tramp busy putting stuff back into some kind of grubby hold-all, obviously being given his marching orders. All this matters because it then becomes the bones of the plot of The Caretaker. The Caretaker is not an absolute record of reality but it's based on real events and very closely on that particular part of West London.

Roberta Glynn, London
Pinter talks in a seemingly negative sense of his time spent living in Chiswick and Regents Park with his first wife as a time of seclusion and isolation. In your opinion without this experience would his representation of the individual as an outcast within today's society be less powerful?

Michael Billington
You've put your finger on an interesting paradox that writers often produce some of their most vibrant work at a time of their lives when they are struggling, impoverished and even emotionally unhappy. What staggers me is how fertile Pinter was in those years from 1958 to 1966/67. What a great outrush of work there was in the theatre, the television and in cinema. If you look at Pinter's life in that period it starts with him living in a very mean and humble flat in Chiswick, admittedly he then ends up in considerable comfort in Regents Park, but also that time's one of emotional unhappiness. I would suggest there is no automatic correlation between a writer's physical comfort and writing success. It is the difficult, tormented early years that often produce or stimulate the work that defines the artist.

continued: Cricket, wealth and politics, Ireland