Harold Pinter, who died on Christmas Eve 2008, was one of Britain’s greatest ever playwrights whose prolific output over the course of a 50-year career came to optimise the subtle conflicts of the human condition.

His plays are the embodiment of tension and bewilderment, reflecting his characters’ often-fatal flaws in the stifled dialogue and unsettling situations. To watch a performance of Pinter – with the stark sets, minimal casts and inconclusive narrative structures – is to watch a portion of life at its most disconcerting, cut raw and slapped on a stage.

There was something inescapably real and earthy about his writing, but he was never an exponent of the banal – the people in his plays resembled the oddballs of Dickens or Steinbeck, with the same menace, naivety or eccentricity. But you never felt sure if Pinter was showing us these characters to entertain us, to teach us a lesson, or just because.

Harold Pinter was born on 10 October, 1930, in Hackney. His parents were of Polish descent and he had a modest middle class upbringing. He was a wartime evacuee and it has been tempting for critics to trace key themes of isolation and confusion back to the time he spent separated from his family in Cornwall.

He was a splendid student who, as you might expect, wrote enthusiastically for the school magazine. He also acted and this won him a place at RADA, though this proved to be another traumatising experience for him. He resisted national service as a conscientious objector, earning him a hefty fine but not the prison sentence he had anticipated. “I took my toothbrush to the trials,” he later admitted.

In the early 1950s he began publishing poetry, then joined an Irish Shakespeare troupe acting under the name David Baron. After four years on the rep circuit, he wrote his first play when his friend Henry Woolf persuaded him to push ahead with an idea for a short piece called The Room which was first performed by Woolf and others at the University of Bristol.

Later that year he completed The Birthday Party, his first full length play which debuted in Cambridge then moved to Hammersmith. The critic Irving Wardle coined the term ‘comedies of menace’ to describe his work over the next few years. It featured a variety of underworld characters, such as the two hired thugs of The Dumb Waiter (1957) or the quixotic vagrant Davies and his strange hosts in The Caretaker (1959). The success of The Caretaker (which ran for more than 400 performances at the Duchess Theatre in Westminster) saw Pinter come into huge demand for both theatre and television scripts.

His material during the 1960s had an ethereal quality that drew from the central theme of the mind’s workings and this part of his oeuvre was sometimes categorised by critics as his ‘memory plays’ period. He also became more experimental with his work in this period. His dialogue had always been praised for its natural lyricism and rhythm with which he deftly transcended narrative conventions, but in conceptual works like Landscape (1967) and Silence (1968) he did away with plots altogether, leaving nothing but words and the silences which had become his trademark.

Conversely, in later works, his messages became more overt, effectively filling in the silences. For instance, in One for the Road (1984) he set the action against the background of an unnamed despotism. Nevertheless, his more political plays retained the Pinter calling cards of organic dialogue and allusion to a wider picture outside the constraints of the stage – perhaps he had always been writing about brutality and oppression, even when his plays were set in basements and boarding houses.

As he entered old age, there was a notable shift in theme towards death, both on a level personal to the characters and with references to mass slaughters such as the Holocaust. He wrote his last play, Celebration, in 1999, but continued to pen sketches and screenplays despite increasingly poor health (he was treated for throat cancer in 2001) and an announcement of retirement in 2005.

In total he wrote more than 30 plays for different mediums, plus numerous pieces of prose and poetry. He had also directed stage and screen adaptations of his and other people’s work and acted in several productions. His honours included a Tony award for the The Homecoming (1964), several BAFTA wins, the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry in 2004 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005.

He died at the age of 78. He had been suffering from liver cancer.