"The play merely states that two men come down to take away another man", Harold Pinter wrote on March 30 1958. "Will the audience absorb the implications?"
This was before the London premiere of his first play The Birthday Party, which set him on the long, unlikely road to yesterday's Companionship of Honour. After a puzzled reception in peaceful, torpid 1950s England, the play became a classic as later did The Caretaker and No Man's Land.
More than any writer of his time, its author, now 71 and suffering from stomach cancer, is credited with decoding into art the subtexts and power struggles which underlie ordinary human speech.
Pinter has irascibly criticised Tony Blair's government over Serbia and other issues and refused a knighthood.
Before Trevor Nunn became rich and a celebrity from directing West End musicals, he was almost as admired as Pinter for productions of near-genius such as his 1976 Macbeth with Ian McKellan and Judi Dench when he was Royal Shakespeare Company director. He receives his knighthood after a distinguished but uneasy five years as National Theatre director.
The third big theatrical beast in the honours list is the polymathic Jonathan Miller, also knighted. Though he currently lists his occupation as "research fellow in neuropsychology, University of Sussex", he made his mark as an undergraduate satirist in Beyond the Fringe 40 years ago and followed this with productions, many of them celebrated as radically experimental, of 30 plays and 40 operas.
Another knighthood is bestowed on the painter Peter Blake. He designed the sleeve for the Beatles Sgt Pepper album, now a prime artefact of pop history, in the 1960s and still lists among his recreations "going to rock and roll concerts".
A belated OBE goes to the cinema director Ken Annakin , 87, whose films range from Miranda (1948) through to Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1965) to Genghis Khan (1991). OBEs also go to Ian Rankin, author of the Inspector Rebus crime novels, to the clothes designer Caroline Charles and to the provocative artist Steve McQueen.
McQueen won the 2000 Turner prize with a film of a house falling down around his ears. He followed this with a film in which he wrenched and tweaked his nipple.
A Guardian critic wrote: "At times, McQueen is more concerned with pleasuring himself than with staying in focus in front of the lens."
