If my hands forestall him
He is deaf to my care.
If I own to enjoy him
The bargain’s bare.

The fault of alarm
He does not share.
I die the dear ritual
And he is my bier.

This is an enigmatic poem, but “her” tone is open, honest, because she understands the tension, the ambiguity, of male-female relations. And it’s a striking early example of Pinter disclosing the female voice in himself. You can’t think about Pinter long without feeling that, inside this out-and-out Modernist, there is a powerful Romantic at work. When it comes to gender, he is a Romantic dualist. There isn’t much androgyny in Pinter. Men are men, women women, and the distinction between the two is already one basis for drama, though he expresses part of himself in some or all of his women. As with heterosexual male artists from Wagner to Balanchine, Pinter has needed to use the feminine principle to give voice to things he will not ascribe to male characters. If I understood Jung better, I think I would analyse some of his male-female dialectic as the dialogue of animus and anima.

Pinter first fully enunciated these separate principles in his 1968 play Landscape, and I think he never wrote anything so perfect before or since. Duff and Beth sit at a table and talk, but they seem not to hear each other. The differences between them are crucial. He talks to her and about her, and is frustrated that she never hears. She, by contrast, never looks at him. Yet it is possible that at some level she does hear: every time she speaks, she seems to be changing the subject, to be eluding him. The main ambiguity of the play is whether she is talking about him or about some other man. Gradually it emerges that she has suffered some prolonged episode of shock and has blocked herself off from present-tense reality. But the beauty of the play is that she has retreated to a realm of memory; of sensitivity, and love. At its end, Duff describes a moment, possibly the moment when first she succumbed (“You stood in the hall and banged the gong”). He recalls what he’d like to have done to her, with very definite ideas of what men and women are.

Duff: I thought you would come to me, I thought you would come into my arms and kiss me, even . . . offer yourself to me. I would have had you in front of the dog, like a man, in the hall, on the stone, banging the gong, mind you don’t get the scissors up your arse, or the thimble, don’t worry, I’ll throw them for the dog to chase, the thimble will keep the dog happy, he’ll play with it with his paws, you’ll plead with me like a woman . . . .

But Beth’s memories are of a quite different moment; and she closes the play like this:

Beth: He lay above me and looked down at me. He supported my shoulder.
Pause.
So tender his touch on my neck. So softly his kiss on my cheek.
Pause.
My hand on his rib.
Pause.
So sweetly the sand over me. Tiny the sand on my skin.
Pause.
So silent the sky in my eyes. Gently the sound of the tide.
Pause.
Oh my true love I said.

Landscape is a Modernist version of a Romantic mad scene: Beth is singing of love and bliss and loveliness; everyone else, in a realm of blunt prose, knows that she has lost her wits. Yet she is happier, freer, and, in an important sense, larger, even stronger than they (or we) are. The unbearable poignancy of the play is its two opposite implications: one, that she is indeed talking about Duff; the other, that it was Duff who drove her into this condition.

One way or another, Pinter’s women often elude their men. They remind me of a late-Romantic heroine, Mélisande. In Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande, and in Debussy’s opera, in the opening scene, her future husband Golaud, finding her amid a forest, starts to interrogate her. At one point, he says: “Oh! Vous êtes belle! Quel âge avez vous?” To which she replies with a non-sequitur that sounds echt Pinter: “Je commence à avoir froid”.

To talk of “cold” is Mélisande’s way of eluding Golaud’s grasp, and also of putting the dampers on his possessiveness. Kate does it in Old Times to Deeley and Anna. They’re talking about her smile, the smile she had years ago and that she still has; Kate chimes in by saying: “This coffee’s cold”. Anna apologizes straight away; and the conversation changes. (This isn’t the only time in Pinter that “cold” puts a chill on people who are becoming possessive.) Kate takes charge of the end of Old Times by the opposite of a non sequitur. She turns to Anna, and says: “I remember you dead”. Kate pronounces her dead at some length, consigns her to the past, and – still addressing Anna – refers to the memory of a man who is almost certainly Deeley. Devastatingly, she says:

He suggested a wedding and a change of environment.
Slight pause.
Neither mattered.

Kate asserts her complete freedom from the others, and remains immobile for the remainder of the play. When you first take in Old Times, you feel liberated with Kate: her act of independence is as breathtaking as Ruth’s in The Homecoming, but it seems less dismaying because she really has achieved liberty. The more one sees it, however, the more its ending touches on tragedy. Pinter closes Old Times with seven different wordless tableaux: Kate is motionless in each, but Anna and Deeley take up positions around her, positions that re-enact the past – that are the past, the past in which they are stuck for ever.

I have mentioned the Romantic mad scene, and Pinter comes close to it again in two later plays: A Kind of Alaska (1982) and Ashes to Ashes (1996). The heroines of these two plays are both set apart psychologically, like Beth in Landscape. In A Kind of Alaska, Deborah is emerging from a terrible ordeal, twenty-nine years of apparent sleep, and the play’s climax is her delivery of an astounding monologue. As it begins, she relives the waking claustrophobia of her supposed sleep:

Yes, I think they’re closing in. They’re closing in. They’re closing the walls in. Yes.

Let me out. Stop it. Let me out. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Shutting the walls down on me. Shutting them down on me. So tight, so tight. Something panting, something panting.