Pinter showed dark side of people, governments

Pinteresque is now an accepted word in the English language. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it means a situation 'marked especially by halting dialogue, uncertainty of identity and air of menace'. The word menace is perhaps the key.

Harold Pinter, who died on Wednesday from cancer, aged 78, was a master of menace. In his plays, he explored the hidden menace and psychological violence people knowingly or not inflict on each other in their marital and family lives and in their friendships. As a political activist, he denounced and campaigned against state-sponsored violence, especially that perpetuated by western governments such as the United States and its lesser partner Britain.

His activism was necessarily one-sided by ignoring the positive roles these countries often play in the world's financial and security systems. But it also exposed the hypocrisy of these nations when their policy is conducted under the guise of promoting democracy and freedom yet results in untold suffering and destruction in other peoples' homelands. He was, notably, an early and vocal critic of the US invasion of Iraq, and the British government's role in it. Events have proved him right. In a career spanning half a century and producing more than two dozens plays, the Nobel laureate forced a generation of audiences to confront the darker aspects of human relationships in a light most of us would rather not see. From the early The Birthday Party to Betrayal in his later period, Pinter did so by implanting often absurdist humour in dialogue that made his audience laugh with unease.

Like Bertrand Russell, another great British dissident and public intellectual, before him, Pinter was embraced by the establishment, which he kept at arm's length as a principled moral stance. He refused a knighthood from the British queen. And while he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, he turned his acceptance speech into an attack on US foreign policy.

Pinter's life work was a valuable call on us not to be complacent in our personal lives or to be conformists as citizens.