Playwright Harold Pinter gets a special Evening Standard theatre award as outstanding dramatist of the past 50 years. “Amid cheers, Pinter accepted the award, a statuette, happily – and with a barbed memory. ‘Forty six years ago my [first] play The Birthday Party was performed in London and slaughtered by the critics – particularly by the Evening Standard, by the way. But in the early new year I’m happy to say that rehearsals will start for the fourth revival in London’.”