It is hard to write even a short appreciation of what Pinter has achieved in the performing arts because the public view of this most original of writers has changed almost as much as his work itself within his own lifetime. Influenced at the outset by Samuel Beckett and his discovery that it was not necessary to overburden the audience with gratuitous information about the background and inner thoughts of your characters, Harold became, in turn, a disastrous influence on a later generation of playwrights who thought that there was nothing to his work but style - and a style, what's more, that could be ripped off like lead from a church roof. It is only with the passage of time and the growing familiarity of what I would take to be his three great masterpieces - The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and The Homecoming - that everyone has finally come to understand that his plays are as much marked out by their content as they are by their distinctive personal music.

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The work of most good writers is born out of contradiction. Snoo Wilson once wrote perceptively that John Osborne was a perfect Edwardian because he embodied the most notable archetypes of the period: he was both gentleman and cad. Harold, by contrast, belongs firmly to the mid-20th century, because in him you find expressed the great struggle of the period - between primitive rage on the one hand and liberal generosity on the other. Anyone who meets Harold quickly becomes charmed by his volatility, which has always seemed to me only a byproduct of his openness. Because Harold does actually listen to what you say, there is a better-than-even chance that he will also react to it. This surprises some people. As an artist, Pinter has an alarming range. He can play great, big major chords made up only of anger, indignation and contempt. But, at the other end of the instrument, he can also unbalance you by reaching humour, grace and intense personal warmth.

Harold has always had a deeply ambivalent attitude to the audience, never being quite sure whether or not he likes them, and therefore never offering the easy handhold of an "attitude" with which they might be able to take some simplified view of the events on stage. He keeps his guard high. It is this uncompromising approach to an audience, this willingness to say "Take it or leave it" which finally makes his work so inimitable. He is to be approached on his own terms or none at all. It does not surprise me in the slightest that the author himself was delighted when after a performance of Ashes to Ashes in New York, a member of the audience was heard to remark: "And he has the brass balls to call this a play?" Rarely can a playwright have combined so much nerve, so much gall with so much pleasure in that gall.

Two last things. The lazy Time Out-driven orthodoxy of the past few decades has been that the British cinema has never outgrown its dependence on the stage, and that until we develop a separate cinema culture our films will remain too literary and parochial. In fact, the reverse is the truth - that without the contribution of stage dramatists, actors and directors (Stephen Frears and Mike Leigh, for instance), the British cinema would barely have existed at all. Nobody more perfectly exemplifies the mastery of both media than Harold - who managed during the decade of his greatest fertility in playhouses also to produce the flawless screenplays for Joseph Losey's films of The Servant and Accident.