Harold Pinter (1930 - 2008).

See:
Jamieson, Alastair. "Nobel Laureate Playwright Harold Pinter Dies." Daily Telegraph December 26, 2008:

The writer and poet penned more than 30 plays, including The Caretaker and The Birthday Party. His style of dialogue, with its long pauses and disconnected conversation, was so distinctive that the word "Pinteresque" entered the Oxford English Dictionary. His wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, said: “He was a great, and it was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years.” The east London-born playwright had been due to pick up an honorary degree earlier this month from the Central School of Speech and Drama in London but was forced to withdraw due to illness. After an early struggle for recognition he became widely accepted as one of the world's greatest playwrights after winning acclaim for works including The Birthday Party and Betrayal. Pinter was well-known for his left-wing political views and was a vociferous critic of US and UK foreign policy, voicing opposition on a number of issues including the bombing of Afghanistan in 2001. (Read the rest here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/3949147/Nobel-Laureate-playwright-Harold-Pinter-dies.html.)

Kamm, Oliver. "Harold Pinter: an Impassioned Artist who Lost Direction on the Political Stage." Times December 26, 2008:

Pinter’s dramatic work has an inescapably political dimension in its portrayal of domestic lives that are pervaded by fear of external and often unperceived threat. In The Birthday Party, two strangers threaten and eventually apprehend the main character. In The Caretaker, Aston is in terror of the electroconvulsive therapy intended to ward off insanity. In The Dumb Waiter, a person unseen sends messages on the dumbwaiter. He valiantly campaigned against torture and – through the writers’ association, PEN – for freedom of artistic expression. But when Pinter attempted to identify threats in his explicitly political writings, his work descended to crude caricature. Pinter turned to political writing at a time when other leading left-wing dramatists perceived the limits of radical theatre. In an interview in 1996, he said: “Political theatre now is even more important than it ever was, if by political theatre you mean plays that deal with the real world, not with a manufactured or fantasy world.” Yet the political world that Pinter conjured up was an extravagant fantasy. In it, the Western democracies exemplified not imperfection or even moral failings, but venality and bloodlust. . . . . (read the rest here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5398006.ece)