Harold Pinter: Not a word out of place

Harold Pinter's plays make him laugh. They may be famed for their pauses and an air of unspecified menace, but the Nobel laureate thinks reverential fans are simply missing the joke. "I think there has been a curious solemnity about [productions of] my work. I don't know why. It's inexplicable," he says. "I do think my work is funnier than most people are led to believe. I laugh, anyway."

He points to the production of one of his earliest plays, The Dumb Waiter (from 1957) currently at the Trafalgar Studios, London) to make his point. "This excellent production by Harry Burton with two great performances [from Lee Evans and Jason Isaacs] gets an enormous amount of laughs," he says.

And while many critics hated Pinter's People, an evening of Pinter sketches assembled by the stand-up Bill Bailey with a cast of fellow comedians including Sally Phillips, the author himself leaps to the show's defence. "I'm all for it. I admire these people in Pinter's People. I really think they're a great bunch - they're so robust and energetic. I think they were terrific." He certainly prefers an enthusiastic approach, as demonstrated at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, to an awed one. "I don't want to be deferred to," he says.

He insists the humour is intrinsic and works regardless of where the works are being performed. "I've seen a number of plays in the past in a number of different languages and it's interested me greatly that the laughs are always there in the same places - in Serbo-Croat, in French, Portuguese, Italian, Greek... It's a tribute to the translation, obviously, but it seems to me endemic in the work."

Anyone wishing to test Pinter's claim will certainly get the opportunity over the next few months. Forthcoming productions include Old Times with Neil Pearson and Janie Dee, directed by Peter Hall, which begins a tour at the Theatre Royal Brighton on Tuesday, while the Sheffield Crucible's staging of The Caretaker with the former EastEnder Nigel Harman transfers to the Tricycle, London, next month. In June, the Donmar will present his love-triangle play Betrayal, and the National Theatre will revive The Hothouse the following month.

Off-stage, Pinter's deftness as a screenwriter will be evident in the new film adaptation of Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, which stars Michael Caine and Jude Law with a brief - "about two minutes" - appearance by Pinter himself. He will be acting again for Radio 3 in The Homecoming, directed by Thea Sharrock, with a cast including Michael Gambon, Samuel West, Rupert Graves and Gina McKee.

And next Monday, More4 is presenting a double-bill of programmes dedicated to the 76-year-old actor-playwright-director's work. Gambon, again, takes the lead in another all-star cast featuring Colin Firth, James Fox, Julia McKenzie, James Bolam, Sophie Okonedo and Penelope Wilton in the first television production of Celebration. Pinter's play, set in a fancy West End restaurant, premiered at the Almeida in 2002. The screening will be followed by a film by his Dumb Waiter director (and - a very important bond - fellow cricket-lover) Harry Burton, which explores Pinter's works and working methods.

"There's a lot going on," the playwright says. "It's the busiest year of my life." Ask him why and he's less clear, though he muses on the suggestion that his strong political stance, crystallised in his Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech, has added to his prominence.

But the flurry of interest is certainly keeping him busy. After marking his 75th birthday two years ago with a shower of accolades topped by the Nobel, many would have opted for a gentle slide into grand old age. Not so Pinter. Despite suffering two brushes with death in recent years, through cancer of the oesophagus and a rare skin-disease, he returned to the stage last October with a compelling, sell-out, performance of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape at the Royal Court.

He is closely involved with many of the productions in the pipeline. When I spoke to him he was planning to see a run-through of Old Times on Tuesday and intended to pop into the editing suite for Sleuth. He will be taking a hand in the casting for both Betrayal, to be directed by Roger Michell, and Hothouse, under the ex-Royal-Court director Ian Rickson. "I have to say, I'm very proud of my work," he says, without any obvious arrogance. "I'm very happy about good productions."

His pleasure appears to stem partly from an abiding love of fellow actors. "I find working in rehearsals with actors terrific," he explains in the film for More4. "They're an extraordinary body of people. They're not only intelligent but responsible and informed. They know their onions, really."

Of course, Pinter himself began as an actor, training at Rada, "disastrously", and then at Central School, and was on the gruelling treadmill of regional rep when he wrote his first play, The Room, exactly 50 years ago.

He was encouraged by his east-London schoolfriend Henry Woolf, and inspired by a party in Fulham, London, where the flamboyant homosexual writer Quentin Crisp was a fellow guest. "We were only there for about 10 minutes but it left an extraordinary impression on me," he recalls on film. He told Woolf about the encounter and said: "'One day I might write a play about this extraordinary image."

He was quickly held to account. Woolf returned to Bristol University, where he was studying, and told the drama department that he knew of this "marvellous new play" that would cost little to mount. They readily agreed so he told Pinter to write it. Pinter, not unreasonably, protested that he had not produced a play before and it would take six months. But the first draft was done in two days and The Room was duly his debut as a writer, aged 26. Woolf directed.

The Birthday Party followed and, though it famously closed within a week, a subsequent rave review from Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times marked the beginning of Pinter's acclaimed writing career. He was, Hobson said, "the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London". Five decades of plays now acknowledged as classics followed.

What emerges from Burton's film is how practical Pinter is as a playwright. He defends the precision of his writing to the hilt, telling actors in a workshop: "If the text isn't right, it certainly hits the author, I can tell you. The least word wrong stands out, you know. I don't want to appear like a stern headmaster [but] it's not helpful for you to get the text wrong..."

But many of his observations are those of the writer who can, and does, perform what he writes. He notes the difference it makes to an actor - and hence the performance - whether members of the cast sit or stand, for instance.

He recalls, with admiration, hearing Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud discuss their respective lunches just before going on stage to perform in the 1975 production of No Man's Land, the work's premiere. "There's so much bullshit talked about preparing for your part and your role. Those were actors who knew that when you got on the stage you acted, not before."

He adds that he thinks that some directors and actors have become hung up on his legendary pauses and silences, to the detriment of the work. "I don't want them just to be on the page, I want them to be vitally part of what's happening on stage," he says. "These damn silences and pauses are all to do with what's going on and what's happening, and if they don't make sense I cut them. When I act in my own plays, I have cut half of them actually."

The combative side of Pinter is also evident as he describes acting as, "a contest with the audience", as to who is in charge. "I had an idea of what would shut an audience up through being an actor," he says, adding: "It doesn't always work, by the way. You can't regulate an audience."

He remains passionately political. "I've always been a political playwright. I haven't always written political plays but I've always been a political person," he says. "There's a very low anger that resides in any respectable, intelligent person in this society about what goes on, and how impotent we seem to be to correct what goes on, and how we give power to people who don't deserve to possess power because they abuse it, and manipulate it, and treat people with contempt, and treat international law with contempt."

His conviction commands respect. Only the brave would risk dissent. Yet he also happily tells stories against himself, remembering an interval of No Man's Land when he was pinned into a corner in an overcrowded bar by a couple who stood in silence for five minutes before the husband observed: "Oh well, not as boring as the normal Pinter, I suppose."

Perhaps he has mellowed. "I'm getting on in life, so I do want to put my feet up," he tells me. In conversation, he speaks openly and touchingly of his 31 years with Lady Antonia Fraser, his wife. They both enjoy playing bridge, though his health problems mean he can no longer enjoy playing tennis and cricket.

He has declared that he has written enough plays, but is still writing poems and hopes, possibly, to do one or two political articles in response to "the ghastliness of the world". He remains as strongly opposed to the war in Iraq as he ever was.

The television production of Celebration fills him with delight. "I do think Celebration is a very funny play, and it's really wonderfully expressed in this programme. I'm really pleased with them."

Part of his willingness to speak apparently stems from his respect for Burton, whom he first met in 1981 when the latter, still a teenager, was asked to play for the Gaieties Cricket Club - an institution that remains close to the playwright's heart. Fiercely loyal to those who become his friends, Pinter says: "He's not only a bloody good cricketer, he turns out to be a good actor and a very, very good director. I hope that he goes on to direct many, many things." And not just by himself. "There are other writers," he says, wryly.

The dramatist seems equally thrilled about doing The Homecoming on Radio 3 alongside "one of the great comic actors of all time" in Gambon.

"I start in a couple of weeks. Michael Gambon is going to play my brother and I'm very much looking forward to it," he says. "I'm playing the old man. Since I'm now an elderly man, I'm ready for it."

Harold Pinter's 'Celebration', followed by 'Working with Pinter', shows at 9pm on More4 on Monday 26 February