The least good Pinter play is called Silence, which is part of a double bill called Landscape and Silence and was staged in 1968. In Silence three characters sit in chairs on a stage and what you get are three inter-related monologues though the characters never address each other. At the time it seemed rather arch and undramatic and it's almost never been revived to my knowledge. Maybe if someone were to do it again we might discover hidden virtues, but it did seem to me as Pinter at his most obscure and most unapproachable. So Silence for me remains the one to be explored…

Ian Brown, Wales
Was the character of The Caretaker based on someone of whom Pinter had personal experience?

Michael Billington
Davies was based on a tramp who was brought back to the house on Chiswick High Road where Pinter was living in the 1950s. Pinter always claims he didn't get to know this tramp particularly well - he would meet him on the stairs and they'd exchange a few words. When the tramp had been thrown out of the house he bumped into him and I think Pinter gave him a bob or two a few weeks later to help him on his way. But it was the strange mixture of loneliness and aggression that made up his character that Pinter saw as dramatically profitable.

John Gardner, Cheshire
Many critics of Pinter's more recent works such as Moonlight and Ashes to Ashes have found them to exhibit something of a decline in his dramatic skill. I see them more as a development. What is your view?

Michael Billington
I agree with you. Obviously the later plays are much shorter, more compressed, much tighter. They don't have the symphonic structure of plays like The Caretaker or The Homecoming, but I think they are very powerful. I would single out Ashes to Ashes which features only two characters in a room who barely move. And yet although the play starts with domestic tension between the man and the woman, it actually opens up to emit torture, persecution and images of the Holocaust.

What I think Pinter is doing in these later plays is trying to deal with the political history of the last few decades in a very compact and compressed form. I think he's trying to find images that carry resonance, particularly in countries that have lived through torture and tyranny. Again, a play like One for the Road runs for about 25 minutes, it has no more than a handful of characters, it consists of simply an interrogator greeting his victims. And yet whenever that play is done in a country that's lived through some kind of authoritarianism it causes immense resonance. I think it's a very narrow, parochial and often very British view that Pinter somehow declined in the 1980s when he ceased to write these plays about domestic tension and wrote short cryptic plays about political reality. I think the later plays are hugely significant and dramatically exciting.

Ainslie Simmons, London
I'm a great fan of Pinter's more recent work - particularly his stark, brutal and highly politicised works in the 80s - but why do you think these are still overshadowed, in the public's appreciation by The Caretaker, The Birthday Party etc?

Michael Billington
These plays are overshadowed in the public understanding, in Britain. Here he's obviously much better known as the writer of The Caretaker and The Birthday Party than he is the writer of Party Time or Moonlight or Ashes to Ashes. What is fascinating is how the later plays have huge currency abroad and particularly in countries that have emerged from some form of either communist or fascist tyranny, you'll find Pinter's political plays are being done time and again. They understand One for the Road in Spain or in Russia extremely clearly in a way that I don't believe we do in Britain because we have had the comparative luxury of a democratic system, though Pinter himself might dispute that. I think these later works will come into their own with time. Don't forget the later works are also often of a slightly awkward length for conventional commercial management and that's why I think it's important these plays are done as often as possible on television where I also think they often achieve their maximum effect.

continued: A Kind of Alaska, power struggles and Michael's favourite Pinter character

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