And, if I understand Pinter’s plays aright, it is his women – some of them – who comprehend best that no man is an island. They are the divining rods of identity that commune with larger aspects of feeling and experience, sometimes at a terrible personal cost. Really, the dialectic of Ashes to Ashes is the dualism that we can discern in Pinter’s Nobel acceptance speech. On the one hand, there are facts; on the other, uncertainty. On the one hand, there is denial; on the other, there is open witness and serious re-imagination of trauma, of death, of horror, even though these may be inextricably connected to love and loyalty.

How do we reconcile the two? It seems that Harold Pinter does it by giving voice to the masculine and feminine sides of himself – and thereby finding those voices in us.

This was the opening lecture at a recent symposium in Turin called Pinter: Passion, poetry and politics, marking the playwright’s acceptance of the Premio Europa per il Teatro.