It may surprise those who retain the impression that Harold Pinter was a sombre, difficult playwright, but there were a lot of laughs at tonight’s celebration of his life at the National Theatre.
The humour was obviously no surprise to those who love his work including the all-star cast – Alan Rickman, Colin Firth, Jude Law, Lindsay Duncan, Sheila Hancock and Michael Sheen, and that’s just for starters -  who had given up their Sunday evening to remember the late great writer.
But the heart-stopping moment for me was when Kenneth Cranham and Jeremy Irons read some of Pinter’s love poems to his wife. “She dances in my life,” he had written of Lady Antonia Fraser.
If the readings and performances from his plays and prose were a celebration of his genius, those poems were a tribute to an astonishing love-match between the earl’s daughter and the East End political polemicist.
How she sat there in the audience and listened I cannot imagine.
ends