The power of momentous gesture

WHO is Harold Pinter? What kind of writer is he? I spent three years writing a biography of him and inevitably reached certain conclusions. But it is part of Pinter's greatness as a writer that there is something in him that eludes definition: his plays operate like poems, both encouraging and, in a sense, defying rational analysis. Which is another way of saying that they depend for much of their impact on their musicality and rhythm and are best experienced live in the theatre: a good reason for welcoming the Gate Theatre's second four play Pinter Festival.

One thing's for sure about Harold Pinter: he is a very practical man of the theatre who knows precisely what works. He spent much of the 1950s as a jobbing actor, touring Ireland with Anew McMaster and slogging round the English rep circuit. What that gave him was an understanding off the peculiar properties of theatre of light and dark, of pause and silence, of the power of the momentous gesture.

It's no accident that he matured watching two great actor managers, McMaster and Wolfit, at close quarters; much of Pinter's drama is an attempt to reproduce, on a smaller scale but with the same intensity, the huge effects of which they were capable. This, I suspect, is what makes Pinter unique among modern dramatists he combines an idiosyncratic poetic vision with a pragmatic knowledge of how to realise it in stage terms.

But what are the special qualities of Pinter the man and the artist? One is a concern with precision of thought and language. Peter Hall, I am convinced, got it right when he said that the reason for Pinter's absolute precision, whether of speech or dress, is that "there is an awareness of the anarchy and chaos and violence and disorder of life that are pressing in and have to be controlled". Pinter's plays are an attempt both to grapple with that disorder and to subject it to the discipline of art.

Alongside that goes a painful awareness of man's inhumanity to man. In Britain, Pinter has been much attacked for his outspoken comments on a wide range of issues from American foreign policy and British arms sales to the plight of the Kurds and the victims of oppression in Central America. What I sense in Pinter, however, is an instinctive detestation of injustice and a hatred of all authoritarian structures. In that he is not alone; but in him it is combined with a sense of what Shakespeare's Lear calls "the mystery of things" and of the strangeness of time, memory and the whole human experience.

All these qualities are evident in the quartet of plays being done in Dublin, works that span 35 years and that demonstrate both considerable technical differences and the immaculate consistency of The Collection, starring Pinier himself, will open the festival. It was originally written for television in 1961 and is partly about the unverifiable nature of reality. An injured husband wants to know if another man slept with his wife in a hotel in Leeds on a particular night. We are never wholly sure neither are some of the characters. But Pinter uses this as the starting point for an exploration of the way we manipulate truth, of the equivocal nature of sexuality, of the essential solitude of existence.

Pinter, contrary to popular myth, is actually a very convivial man, excellent company over a drink or a meal and always ready to talk about the important things in life, from politics and poetry to theatre and cricket. At the same time, he is constantly alert to human loneliness. And that very Beckettian paradox lies, for me, at the heart of No Man's Land which dates from 1975 and which gets a rare revival in Dublin.

Two men - Hirst, an ageing literary figure and Spooner, a periphrastic gadfly confront each other in the former's home, attentively supervised by Hirst's servants. In Hirst's final hours a titanic struggle takes place to engage his imagination and creative power. A rage for life contrasts with the sense that we pass our days singing in the void and awaiting the inevitable end.

Pinter's plays vary enormously in form and structure in recent years they have become ever more dependent on a resonant single image. But at the heart of them lies a sense of the mystery of existence a feeling that we pass our lives in a state of animated suspension between birth and death, waking and sleeping.

In the case of A Kind Of Alaska, written in 1982, that is almost literally true. It is the only Pinter play to be inspired by an existing literary source a case history in Oliver Sacks's Awakenings. A woman, Deborah, who is a victim of encephalitis lethargic, awakes at the age of 45 from a 29 year sleep the play charts both the miracle of her rebirth and her attempts to adjust to the changed reality around her. It is a haunting and beautiful play one in which Deborah's peculiar plight offers an image of the strange no man's land that, in some sense, we all inhabit.

THE Gate season also offers Dubliners a chance to see Pinter's own production of his latest work, Ashes To Ashes, in which many of his key themes are visible in a highly compressed form. The basic image is one of isolation and separateness a man and a woman, Devlin and Rebecca, confront each other in a room. He persistently questions her about her former lover. But what starts as a nagging personal inquiry opens up into an exploration of the insane cruelties of the Holocaust and, by implication, of the modern world.

How, Pinter seems to be asking, can such things be? And how is it that recognisable human beings, capable of the heart's affections, can at the same time license unspeakable evil? And how can we ourselves remain detached from what is happening around us?

Ashes to Ashes puzzled many British critics. But it seems to me the work of a man who feels an ungovernable responsibility for the world in which he lives.

The danger is that one makes Pinter sound an abstract or difficult writer. In my experience his plays speak to audiences, in the living moment, with great forced and clarity; what is hard to put into words is their precise meaning. Pinter, unlike some writers, doesn't start with big, extractable themes he begins with a phrase, an image, a fragment of personal experience that haunts and obsesses him and then develops it according to the dictates of his imagination.

He surrenders to what Borges calls the "voluntary dream" of artistic creation, while always keeping in mind the practicalities of theatre and clearly his fears and insecurities speak to myriad spectators around the globe.

You can't easily sum Pinter up in a journalistic phrase, though many have tried With tags such as "Master of the Pause" or "Comedy Menace" but if I had to describe him to someone totally unfamiliar with his work, it would be as an instinctively radical poet, whose chosen medium is drama.