The great comedian Max Miller used to sign off with, “There’ll never be another”. I feel much the same way about the person whose death dominated the news at Christmas – Harold Pinter. Of all the millions of words written and spoken in tribute to Pinter, one phrase haunts me. “Yesterday,” said David Hare in the immediate wake of Pinter’s death, “when you talked about Britain’s greatest living playwright, people knew who you meant. Today they don’t.” Simple but true. Not merely has a throne been vacated. I suspect there may never be another dramatist as effortlessly dominant as Pinter.

I felt much the same way after the death of Laurence Olivier in 1989. He was more than a great actor. He was the spokesman for, and symbol of, the profession, a title earned by his multiple roles as protean performer, National Theatre director and commercial producer. Whatever there was to do in the theatre, Olivier had done it. Today we have countless actors who inspire our affection. But no one individual embodies the art of acting in quite the way Olivier did.

As with Olivier, so with Pinter (what a pity they only worked together once, on a memorable Granada production of The Collection). Pinter’s special quality as a dramatist stemmed, more than most obits admit, from his vast experience of life and theatre. In his early days, he was not just a drama student and rep actor but a published poet and a guy who’d knocked about the world a bit – he’d been everything from doorman and dishwasher to waiter and dance hall bouncer. Pinter had learned the tricks of the theatrical trade from weekly rep and touring Ireland with Anew McMaster. He’d also scraped a living elsewhere and spent time with down-and-outs. I’m reminded of the early careers of Eugene O’Neill who was a merchant seaman and Arthur Miller who worked, after the Depression, on a factory-floor.

I’m not claiming you have to be a horny-handed son of toil to be a great playwright – Terence Rattigan, to my knowledge, never went down the mines or did vacation work as a navvy. But Pinter was part of a generation for whom playwriting was a calling rather than a profession. Pinter came late to the business; he was 26 when he wrote The Room. By that time, he had a mass of life-experience and practical theatrical know-how on which to draw, and it was the combination of a poetic ear and a pragmatic eye that made him a great dramatist. Michael Gambon, in fact, tells a good story of confronting a seemingly intractable psychological problem in one of the Kilburn love-nest scenes in the first-ever production of Betrayal. Pinter apparently came into rehearsal, looked at the set and announced “the table’s in the wrong place”. Problem instantly solved.

Today we have a plethora of first-rate dramatists: Hare, Ayckbourn, Churchill, Stoppard, plus a whole new generation, spearheaded by Roy Williams and Kwami Kwei-Armah, who put previously unexplored areas of British life on stage. But, if Pinter will be impossible to replace, it will be for historical reasons. He had lived through a war, known hardship and learned, through the treadmill of rep and nightly observation of great actors like McMaster and Donald Wolfit, just about all there is to know about the mechanics of writing and performing.

Even if talent today is often promoted too young, great plays will continue to be written. I doubt, however, there will be anyone who brings to the craft quite such a formidable bank of knowledge as Pinter or sustains such a durable career.

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