The double bill of The Room and Celebration at the Almeida Theatre in March 2000 provided a unique occasion on which to attempt to obtain some view or perspective on Pinter. Here were his first and his latest play, forty-three years between them, directed by the author, with an excellent cast, many of them experienced Pinter actors, four of them playing in both plays: The Room given an evocatively detailed 'period' setting, drab, utilitarian, a murky refuge warmed by a flickering gas-fire and filled with the depressing lodging-house furniture of the 1950s; Celebration took place in a smart, postmodern restaurant, all curved banquettes and ostentatious table-linen, a glance, according to some of the first-night critics, at 'The Ivy', but replicated in many of the smarter establishments in the streets outside the theatre. Private and public, domestic and social: nice weak tea and bacon and eggs in The Room, duck, osso bucco and Frascati for the ladies in Celebration. Even the names resonate differently: ordinary or formal in The Room: Bert and Rose, Mr Kidd, Riley; and a less specific, apparently classless fluidity in Celebration's Lambert, Prue, Suki, Richard. This was London, and Islington, then and now.