Harold Pinter at 75: an Irish celebration

Arthur, first Duke of Wellington, might have been prompted to reconsider. Famously, he disavowed his Irishness explaining that "because a man is born in a stable that does not make him a horse!"

Some of England's leading actors gathered over the weekend in Dublin in a room full of horses in the house where Arthur was born, to celebrate the 75th birthday of Harold Pinter, England's greatest living playwright - an event and a fact almost ignored in his own country.

There in the Waterloo Room of the Merrion Hotel, its dark walls dotted with pictures of men on horses - including Arthur, the King of Prussia, the Emperor of Austria, the Heyman of the Cossacks (sic), the Duke of York - they gathered for a "meet and greet" before going to the Gate Theatre for a rehearsal of that night's reading of Celebration, Pinter's most recent play.

Among them were Jeremy Irons, Penelope Wilton, Derek Jacobi, Michael Gambon, and some of our own leading actors, including Sinéad Cusack, Stephen Brennan, Donna Dent, Cathy Belton, and Alan Stanford, who was director of the readings.

These included Family Voices on Friday, Celebration on Saturday, and last night a selection from other Pinter plays, poetry and prose.

Indeed Pinter himself who, though ill, was in Dublin for the weekend, read his poem Paris at the Gate last night.

Gate director Michael Colgan felt that Pinter and Beckett were among the greatest playwrights.

It is why, as well as presenting the entire Beckett canon, the Gate has had three Pinter festivals, including an event at New York's Lincoln Center in 2001.

As well as the weekend's celebrations the theatre will stage Pinter's Betrayal from Friday, with previews on Wednesday and Thursday. Michael Gambon, who left Dublin when he was six, has acted in many Pinter plays and helped create the role of Jerry in the original production of Betrayal. He loves Pinter's work, reflecting that its subtext is generally "two miles deep", and that the playwright was also his favourite director.

Gambon was born in a house in the city too, but still "loves Dublin". As a boy he accompanied his father to Camden town in London and once asked him why so many Irish lived there.

"It was as far as we we could carry the cases," was the explanation.