Harold Pinter, the playwright who inspired and shocked a generation, died in December at the age of 78. Despite an early desire to be an actor and work as a director, it is for his writing that he will be remembered, and his creation of bleak, dark poetry out of demotic speech.

Despite the public dismissal of his early forays into theatre—The Birthday Party was almost universally disregarded by critics, and taken off the stage within a week—Pinter developed a towering literary reputation, and is recognised as one of the most original talents of modern British theatre. His work never failed to gain a reaction, but rather than relying on shock tactics, he combined elements of comedy with dark violence to produce works that could never be neatly resolved or concluded. His relevance and durability in the theatrical canon must be viewed as a result of the highly political nature of his work. A suspicion of authority haunts his plays; having been called up for National Service in 1948 he refused, risking imprisonment – an act that demonstrated his independence of spirit and refusal to conform to the hegemony of the state.

Although Pinter’s plays are associated with the menacing, inexplicable world of the theatre of the absurd, his plays are set in a far more recognisable locale than Beckett’s or Ionesco’s. He was renowned for frustrating the audience’s realistic expectations of the characters, enabling him to make a much more direct critique of social power relations – a technique he refined to staggering effect in The Homecoming. While the audience may be presented with an ordinary domestic scenario, populated with an apparently average family group, Pinter uses the sense of familiarity this situation creates to subvert and question the morality of the characters’ actions.

But perhaps the most distinctive element of Pinter's work is the way in which the spare, oblique dialogue makes the characters’ intentions and motives almost unreadable, despite the violence with which they are often expressed. Rather than a poverty of language suggesting the moral and emotional emptiness of his characters, Pinter’s drama chooses this mode of expression to address their potential to erupt. Pinter used the language of the living-room, the pub and the bus stop to confront social issues, and his characters struggle for dominance over one another linguistically as well as physically. The verbal and the non-verbal are equally important; emphasis of the gaps in conversation marks out the subtlety of Pinter’s craft, illuminating the linguistic ambiguity inherent in our daily conversations.

This combination of exquisitely observed natural speech and a strong sense of the poetry in the language revolutionised notions of the ability of theatre to express the repressed anger and frustration of everyday social interaction. Pinter's techniques have influenced many of our contemporary political playwrights—Martin Crimp and Caryl Churchill to name but two—who have not only adopted the famous pause but taken the imitation of real speech to new levels in an attempt to increase identification with real-life situations in their plays. Writing around the time of theatrical upheaval associated with the 1950s and the rejection of neat, élite drawing-room drama, he was also associated with the experimental new generation at the Royal Court Theatre.

Despite his early critical damnation, Pinter’s exploration of the functions of speech in drama was to pave the way for a new stylistic era. It was only in the mid-1980s that Pinter began to use his talent for addressing domestic power-play to address his feelings on state abuses of power, torture, human rights and the hypocrisies of Western democracies. He should be remembered as one who attempted to give a voice to marginalised writers and speakers throughout the world. His 1988 play Mountain Language was provoked by the Turkish repression of the Kurdish language, but also had bearings upon Thatcherite restrictions regarding expression in Britain. Sparse and brutal, it plays on the relationship between freedom of expression and physical violence and oppression.

Refusing to be swayed by public opinion or even his own wane in popularity as a result of his views, Pinter lost no opportunity to attack governmental injustice where he saw it. In his 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech, he made an impassioned attack on the foreign policy of the United States, using his position to express what he felt people should hear. Mel Gussow, author of Conversations with Pinter noted of him: "In the broadest sense, Pinter has always been a conscientious objector, even as people keep trying to tell him what to do." What made him such a remarkable playwright—and political activist—is that he held on to his unrelenting non-conformity to the end.