She moves through various stages of feeling and awareness before reaching these final two paragraphs:

You say I have been asleep. You say I am now awake. You say I have not awoken from the dead. You say I was not dreaming then and am not dreaming now. You say I have always been alive and am alive now. You say I am a woman.

She looks at Deborah, then back to Hornby.

She is now a widow. She doesn’t go to her ballet classes any more. Mummy and Daddy and Estelle are on a world cruise. They’ve stopped off in Bangkok. It’ll be my birthday soon. I think I have the matter in proportion.
Thank you.

Deborah is not a victim of other human beings, but of an accidental medical condition. She comes to terms with it; in the end – and this is what makes her a Pinter heroine – she is not dependent on the people who have looked after her for nearly thirty years. She takes control and responsibility for her life, and regains her own space. She has been through something like a tragedy, bears witness to it, and achieves a painful kind of grim victory. But it is also a kind of shrinkage. Like anyone who has been through a huge emotional experience, she finds that the return to the blunt facts of everyday reality does not bring with it unequivocal relief: it brings, too, a sense of loss.

I don’t think Ashes to Ashes is a flawless play. Even so, I am tempted to call it Pinter’s greatest. In Landscape, the heroine is locked into an altered psychological state; in A Kind of Alaska, she is painfully emerging from one; in Ashes to Ashes, she keeps slipping back into one. She, Rebecca, keeps expressing what she feels are memories, and what he, Devlin, sometimes insists are delusions.

Devlin is the most ambiguous man in all of Pinter. The conversations between him and Rebecca obey several patterns. At first, they feel very much like Freudian analysis: she is recounting memories or dreams, and he is trying to pin these accounts down, to understand them. But soon he steers the conversation towards Socratic logical dialectic, trying to bring rational explanation and argument – traditional male strengths – to bear on what she says. And through all of this, she eludes him with lateral thinking of her own, or with what we might call dream logic. Here is one example. As she speaks, we can hear her “vision” inventing itself as she goes along.

Devlin: Do you follow the drift of my argument?
Rebecca: Oh yes, there’s something I’ve forgotten to tell you. It was funny. I looked out of the garden window, out of the window into the garden, in the middle of summer, in that house in Dorset, do you remember? Oh no, you weren’t there. I don’t think anyone else was there. No. I was all by myself. I was alone. I was looking out of the window and I saw a whole crowd of people walking through the woods, on their way to the sea, in the direction of the sea. They seemed to be very cold, they were wearing coats, although it was such a beautiful day. A beautiful warm, Dorset day. They were carrying bags. There were . . . guides . . . ushering them, guiding them along. They walked through the woods and I could see them in the distance walking across the cliff and down to the sea. Then I lost sight of them. I was really quite curious so I went upstairs to the highest window in the house and I looked way over the top of the treetops and I could see down to the beach. The guides . . . were ushering all these people across the beach. It was such a lovely day. It was so still and the sun was shining. And I saw all these people walk into the sea. The tide covered them slowly. Their bags bobbed about in the waves.

These things haven’t happened in Dorset. But they have happened. Rebecca’s imaginings are large, and to us, disturbing. What makes them more disturbing is the near-detached tone in which she relates them.

It strikes me that, whether by design or not, Rebecca resembles the speaker of Wallace Shawn’s play The Fever (1991), who addresses, head on, the killings of American foreign policy and cannot reconcile them with the peaceful domesticity of life at home. This way madness lies. In Ashes to Ashes, though Devlin is, in part, concerned for Rebecca, he also wants to possess her, to control her, to claim he knows her, and not to inquire about her visions – which are of mass deaths, flights from genocide, the Kindertransport, massacres of the innocent. Here is the climax of the play:

Devlin: What do you say, sweetheart? Why don’t we go out and drive into town and take in a movie?
Rebecca: That’s funny, somewhere in a dream . . . a long time ago . . . I heard someone calling me sweetheart.
Pause.
I looked up. I’d been dreaming. I don’t know whether I looked up in the dream or as I opened my eyes. But in this dream a voice was calling.That I’m certain of. This voice was calling me. It was calling me sweetheart.
Pause.
Yes.
Pause.
I walked out into the frozen city. Even the mud was frozen. And the snow was a funny colour. It wasn’t white. Well, it was white but there were other colours in it. It was as if there were veins running through it. And it wasn’t smooth, as snow is, as snow should be. It was bumpy. And when I got to the railway station I saw the train. Other people were there.
Pause.
And my best friend, the man I had given my heart to, the man I knew was the man for me the moment we met, my dear, my most precious companion, I watched him walk down the platform and tear all the babies from the arms of their screaming mothers.
Silence.
Devlin: Did you see Kim and the kids?
She looks at him.
You were going to see Kim and the kids today.
She stares at him.
Your sister Kim and the kids.
Rebecca: Oh, Kim! And the kids, yes. Yes. Yes, of course I saw them. I had tea with them. Didn’t I tell you?

Of all the moments in all the plays I’ve reviewed over the years, I don’t think any has felt stranger than Devlin’s question, “Did you see Kim and the kids?”. At the Royal Court world premiere in 1996, it seemed such an act of denial on his part, such a refusal to attend to her astonishing testimony, that it felt like being slapped in the face – like walking into a brick wall. But I was lucky enough to see Pinter’s original production, with Lindsay Duncan and Stephen Rea, four times in all, first in London, later in Dublin. And in due course I came to realize that Devlin, here, is trying, however questionably, to restore Rebecca to the real world, trying to bring her back to her senses. And he succeeds, for the moment.

He pulls her back from the brink a few more times. But it never lasts. She keeps withdrawing into this other world, of what strikes us as horror, but is in fact worse – because it is a calm complicity with horror. I don’t believe she has ever experienced this trauma in her own life; I think Ashes to Ashes is Pinter’s most disturbing psychodrama. Unlike Rebecca, Devlin is utterly sane. He is lucid, and, partly, a figure of pathos and compassion, trying to comprehend her. Another part of him, though, is more dictatorial; and, like every bully in Pinter, he senses his own weakness. He makes matters worse when he tries to get Rebecca to re-enact with him her memories of a fascist brutalist lover. He tries to possess her fantasy, and his manner of doing so suggests to me that Rebecca’s fantasies of the fascist monster she recalls having loved are really dreams of this man she has been living with all along, Devlin.

She is locked in memories that aren’t memories. She talks about her baby, then says she doesn’t have a baby. There is, finally, no dialogue between her and Devlin, only between her and an echo of herself. The echo tells us that she is now stuck in her own imaginings and can hear nothing else. But it tells us, too, that she is dreaming of something: a baby, somebody’s baby, anybody’s baby. Rebecca’s dreams, her madness, are larger, more inclusively sane than Devlin’s sanity. Does drama get stranger than this?

I met Pinter a few days after the premiere of Ashes to Ashes. He asked me if I would be seeing it again. I said yes, I would be going back to it in a few days’ time. He asked me to let him know what I made of it after this second viewing. So I did. I wrote him a long letter, in which I explained the four or more main ways, each quite different, in which I felt the play could be interpreted. In one of these ways, I said that Rebecca, however deranged she might seem, was nonetheless in touch with the larger crimes against humanity of our time, whereas Devlin was deliberately deaf to them; and that Rebecca and the play therefore were saying “No man is an island”. Pinter’s reply said mainly this: “Dear Alastair, Your letter was a good read! ‘No man is an island.’ That’s it”.