Pinter is back with a vengeance

The explosion of interest in Harold Pinter plays reached a new level today when the Donmar Warehouse announced a revival of adultery drama Betrayal.

Acclaimed film and theatre director Roger Michell - whose credits include Notting Hill and Venus - is to direct a production of the 1978 play which will open at the Covent Garden theatre in June.

Betrayal, which was filmed in 1983 with Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley, will be on at the same time as another Pinter revival, The Hothouse, in a new production at the National Theatre.

It reinforces Pinter's status as Britain's greatest living playwright.

After what was, for him, a relatively quiet period, the string of Pinter revivals and new productions confirm this is his most successful artistic period since the mid-Sixties when he was basking in the success of The Homecoming and The Caretaker.

Pinter's 1956 play The Dumb Waiter, starring Lee Evans and Jason Isaacs, is playing to sellout audiences at the Trafalgar Studios.

Next month, a production of The Homecoming, starring Sir Harold himself with Michael Gambon, will be broadcast on Radio 3.

Pinter's People, a collection of Sir Harold's best sketches and monologues, performed by four comedians led by Bill Bailey, is being staged at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Pinter himself starred at the Royal Court in a revival of Samuel Beckett's one-man play Krapp's Last Tape last year.

Sir Harold, 76, who is married to acclaimed biographer Lady Antonia Fraser, has been fighting illness over the past 10 years.

He has been treated for cancer and in 2005 was admitted to hospital suffering from a mouth disease that could eventually rob him of his speech.

He said in 2002: "I had never been ill in my life before, really, so it was quite extraordinary, at the age of 71, to suddenly find myself in hospital facing a very severe cancer and a major operation. It was something I had not even considered."