Yes (beat) I think that. (pause) I do think that (beat) What do you think?

Jerry: Well...
Emma: How are you?
Jerry: All right.
Emma: You look well.
Jerry: Well, I'm not all that well, really.
Emma: Why? What's the matter?
Jerry: Hangover. (raises his glass) Cheers. (drinks) How are you?
Emma: I'm fine. (looks round the bar, back at him) Just like old times.
Jerry: Mmn. It's been a long time.
Emma: Yes. (pause) I thought of you the other day.
Jerry: Good god. Why? (laughs) Why?
Emma: Well, it's nice, sometimes, to think back. Isn't it?
Jerry: Absolutely. (pause) How's everything?
Emma: Oh, not too bad. (pause) Do you know how long it is since we met?

It's dialogue like that that has driven audiences (and directors and actors) mad for years. And for good reason. Harold Pinter stripped the theatre of the artifices of language it had built up over the years and returned it to the way people actually talked. He gives artists so little to work with, and yet so much. His plays can be interpreted countless ways, and performances seldom answer all the questions. He is the most influential playwright of the second half of the twentieth century (playwrights like David Mamet, Carol Churchill and Patrick Marber (Closer) have acknowledged his influence) and today he was awarded the NOBEL PRIZE in literature. Pinter has been a favorite of mine since I first saw his work performed (at Carleton College in 1994). I consider him an influence on my writing and even more so on my directing. His attention to details such as punctuation and stage direction opened my eyes to clues you can find, use or ignore in a script. And then there is the discussion of the difference between a beat, a pause and a silence.

Pinter's first play (The Room) debuted in 1957, when he was 27 and shook the foundations of the theatre world. This original review shows exactly how fully formed the pinteresque style arrived into the world: "It is a brief excursion, in a slum room, into the nightmare world of insecurity and uncertainty. It has touches of Ionesco and echoes of Beckett; and somewhere not far distant is the disturbing ghost of that Henry James who turned the screw. What exactly the plot is, where the elusive landlord really lived, who are the unexplained couple seeking lodgings, why the lorry-driver husband is so long mute, what it the parentage of the woman who clings so desperately to shabby respectability, are questions that do not admit of precise solutions. They do not need to. " WHAT??? And all his plays are like that. He defies explanation and simple solutions. His plays have been performed by Donald Pleasance, Vivienne Merchant, Ian Holm, Terrence Rigby, Peggy Ashcroft, Michael Gambon, Judi Dench, Miranda Richardson, Steven Rea, Jason Robards, Blythe Danner, Liev Schrieber, Jean Stapleton, Raul Julia, Roy Schnieder, Juilette Binoche, John Gielgood, Ralph Richardson, Christopher Plummer, Julia Ormond, Anthony Hopkins, Ian Hart, Pete Postlethwaite, John Hurt, Colin Firth and directed by Sir Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn, and Pinter himself. Pinter has also written screenplays (such as The French Lieutenant's Woman) and acted (most recently in Mansfield Park and The Tailor of Panama).

"Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles," the academy said on their website. The nobel prize come with a 10 million swedish crown prize (about 1.25 million dollars). His last play (Rembrance of Things Past, based on the Proust novel) was written in 2000 (I had the good fortune to see it at the National Theatre in London). Recently he has been focusing on poetry and on politics - he has been a very outspoken critic of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and of Britian's involvement in the war in Iraq. In a recent forum of writers on the war in Iraq he opened his statement with the line "Freedom, democracy and liberation. These terms, as enunciated by Bush and Blair essentially mean death, destruction and chaos." He considers them both terrorists and suggests they should go on trial as war criminals. Whatever you think of his politics, his skill as a theatre artist cannot be denied. He had won every other award given and this prize will sit rightfully on his shelf.