His funeral was yesterday.

Leading figures from the worlds of theatre and the arts offered their own tributes to Harold Pinter yesterday, describing him as "the last great playwright", an inspirational hero and a dear friend who had inspired successive generations of dramatists and producers.

"Yesterday when you talked about Britain's greatest living playwright, everyone knew who you meant," the playwright David Hare told the Guardian. "Today they don't. That's all I can say."

His fellow playwright Joe Penhall called Pinter "my alpha and my beta". "Shakespeare and Chekhov had their moments, but for me The Caretaker is the greatest play of all time. He was the most inspirational playwright of the twentieth century. For young playwrights, discovering his plays for the first time was explosively exciting - you immediately wanted to copy him, be him, be like him, anything ... Nobody wrote better lines for actors: clean, hard, intoxicating. Projected in a theatre they expand with elegant, violent effectiveness, like a grenade going off in a Rolls. He was the last great playwright and I will miss him and mourn him like there's no tomorrow."

And, according to the Telegraph, directed his own funeral, with a reading from one of his own plays:

Addressing the mourners, Sir Michael recited the passage from No Man's Land, which includes the lines: "Allow the love of the good ghost. They possess all that emotion trapped. Bow to it. It will assuredly never release them, but who knows what relief it may give to them, who knows how they may quicken in their chains, in their glass jars?"

There were no eulogies to Pinter, just a brief invitation at the end by Lady Antonia to join her for a drink.

Slowly departing, the mourners said goodbye to a man who had risen from his lowly East End origins to be regarded as one of the most important playwrights of the post-war era, a man who turned down a knighthood and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.

As the last one left, a team of grave diggers piled earth on to his coffin, soon leaving it icy and silent.