Harold Pinter is 75 this week, and Alastair McCauley says that the playwright’s long career has been a gift not only to audiences, but to actors and critics as well. “The pauses in Pinter are like the spaces between people in the paintings of Cezanne, Seurat, or Picasso: expressive, charged, firm. They dramatise the tension between characters… When staging his own plays, he doesn’t let his actors into secrets: the mystery is there for them, too. But actors have said he gives them confidence, not least because he knows how vulnerable they can feel.”