Pinter, by contrast, is almost tactlessly potent for a man of his seniority, and a quick glance at the projects he now has on the boil is a vivid index that, mentally, he is not yet ready to receive his bus pass.Consider the evidence. Just opened at the Comedy Theatre, there’s an inspired revival of The Caretaker. This work, in which an old vagrant tries to play two brothers off against each other in order to muscle in on their domestic territory, was the follow-up to The Birthday Party, the play which famously folded in its first week before the rave in The Sunday Times that put the name Harold Pinter on the map.The point, though, is that this revival is directed by Patrick Marber, a young dramatist who has had the wit to see that, quite apart from its being all the things taught about The Caretaker in academe, the play is also the godfather of the Sixties comedy boom. Nascent within it is everything from Peter Cook and Dudley Moore to Steptoe and Son.On Thursday night, an even more extraordinary phenomenon was launched.

Some 18 years after he wrote it on a commission from movie director Joseph Losey, Pinter’s screenplay of Proust’s great novel, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu finally saw the light of day not on screen but on the stage at the Cottesloe in an adaptation which the dramatist co-authored with the director, Di Trevis. This demonstrates a flexibility that is not at the forefront of his public reputation.Douglas Hodge, who plays the electric-shock damaged brother in The Caretaker, and is one of the best younger exponents of Pinter’s art, says that when Pinter addressed the cast of this production he said he wrote the play as a young man and put an awful lot of pauses in and that if they found they could not justify any of them in the chemistry of the relationships they were creating, they should ignore just them.What a difference from the working methods of the author who was one of the profoundest influences on Pinter, Samuel Beckett. The history of the arts offers many examples of kindred spirits meeting and being too shy or prickly to make the most of their encounter (one thinks here of Proust and Joyce, who failed to click in a big way). But Pinter and Beckett hit it off so well that there’s a lovely story of Beckett having to race round Paris at five in the morning in search of emergency bicarbonate of soda to ease Pinter’s gargantuan hangover after a joint boozing spree.The dramatist David Hare has suggested that Pinter is actually Beckett’s superior, rooting the existential struggles of the latter “in a real social world instead of arid limbo”. It’s a statement that argues less an insight into the true nature of their relation than an immature desire in Hare to create point-scoring hierarchies. After all, who is looking, at this altitude, for a pecking order? In one respect, though, Pinter does prove himself the greater theatrical animal.Beckett’s work, though unsurpassable in its gift for positioning itself at the tattered extremities of human existence, became, from the practical staging point of view, more and more an exercise in directorial control freakery. As Hodge’s story demonstrates, Pinter, by contrast, knows that work in the theatre is always work-in-progress (or regress) and there are things that even the most eminent authors are better advised not to set in stone.Patrick Marber – who, like Pinter, functions as a dramatist, an actor, and a director – raises the very interesting issue of how, in such a composite artist, different types of power can operate simultaneously.

Much of Pinter’s work is about power and its abuses, and one of the metaphors for this is territorial rivalry for stage space and the right to possession of a language. The parallels with being an author/actor/director are not hard to find. Marber – who has directed work by both of his own main writing influences (Pinter and David Mamet), and himself acted in Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow – says that as a stage- writer you develop a strong sense of the ownership of the language you have invented. This sense must pass to the actor on stage, recreating that moment of creation.