PS: I've just won the Nobel

Gate director Michael Colgan found out in Pinter's e-mail to him that the playwright had won the prize, he tells Rosita Boland

On Monday, he turned 75. Yesterday, London-born playwright Harold Pinter was awarded the 2005 Nobel literature prize, worth €1.07 million. It has been an extraordinary week for the man regarded as Britain's greatest living playwright.

One of Pinter's most famous plays is The Birthday Party. However, he celebrated his own 75th birthday not in his native London, but in Dublin. In partnership with the Dublin Theatre Festival, the Gate Theatre is currently presenting "Pinter 75, a Celebration".

In Dublin, Gate director Michael Colgan first heard the news of Pinter's Nobel prize yesterday in a phonecall from British playwright Tom Stoppard. He then received a long e-mail from Pinter about the weekend he had just spent in Dublin.

"As for the celebrations," Pinter had e-mailed, "it was one of the highest points of my life, along with the first night of The Caretaker in 1960 and meeting Antonia [his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser] for the first time."

"There was a PS," says Colgan. "It said, 'By the way, I just heard 45 minutes ago that I won the Nobel'."

The Gate has had a long association with the playwright: it previously presented two festivals of his work in Dublin, in 1997 and 1994, as well as staging his plays in New York in 2001, and Pinter has both acted and directed with the theatre in Dublin.

As part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, the Gate is staging two of Pinter's plays, Old Times and Betrayal. Anyone attending the performance of Old Times at the Gate yesterday week, the first day of his five-day visit, would have had the quintessential Pinteresque experience: watching the audience watch audience-member Pinter watching his own play.

The Gate also held a Pinter Celebration Weekend; a weekend of readings, films and discussions of his work. Pinter read Family Voices, which was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1981. The culmination of the weekend's celebrations was a party on Sunday, held at the Unicorn restaurant. Among those who gathered in Dublin to celebrate his birthday and pay tribute to him as a master playwright were actors Michael Gambon, Jeremy Irons, John Hurt, Stephen Rea, Penelope Wilton, Derek Jacobi, Donna Dent, Stephen Brennan, and Alan Stanford. Michael Colgan presented Pinter with a book of tribute letters from his peers; among them, playwrights Tom Stoppard, Václav Havel, Patrick Marber, Brian Friel, David Hare, David Mamet, and Neil La Bute.

It did not go unnoticed that it was Dublin, rather than his native London, that was staging his plays this month and formally paying tribute to Pinter at 75. Writing of the Dublin celebrations on the front page of the Guardian last Saturday, that paper's theatre critic, Michael Billington wrote: "They say a prophet is not without honour, save in his own country. The same is often true of writers . . . British theatre seems to have adopted Alan Bennett's cheeky suggestion, on the occasion of Pinter's 50th birthday, that the best way to commemorate it would be with a two-minute silence."

Whatever about the silence from the establishment in London on his birthday - the only company there currently staging his work is a fringe one - yesterday his peers were vocal in their praise of his Nobel. David Hare said, "This is a brilliant choice. Not only has Harold Pinter written some of the outstanding plays of his time, he has also blown fresh air into the musty attic of conventional English literature, by insisting that everything he does has a public and political dimension. "He's been both an example and an inspiration to us all."

Theatre director Peter Hall, who has worked with Pinter for more than 40 years, said the award was "a great prize for a great and original poet of the theatre".

Tom Stoppard, who was in Dublin at the weekend for the celebrations, said, "It's wholly deserved and I'm completely thrilled. As a writer, Harold has been unswerving for 50 years. With his earliest work he stood alone in British theatre up against the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics, the audience and writers too. The fact that he brought the theatre around the corner was a test of his character as well as his artistry."