Laughing with a ‘comedy of menace’
Little Menace: Pinter Plays
★★★1/2 (out of 4) Written by Harold Pinter. Directed by Thomas Moschopoulos. Until March 10 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 50 Tank House Lane. soulpepper.ca or 416-866-8666 The title of Soulpepper Theatre’s latest production, Little
Menace: Pinter Plays, comes from British playwright Harold Pinter’s defining tone.
It was coined as “the comedy of menace” by critic Irving Wardle in the late1950s — described as the unique way Pinter allows his characters to drop in and out of the destructive circumstances they are in or are creating, to “joke about the situation while oiling a revolver.”
The audience laughs at the absurdity of it all: the purposefully vague context, Pinter’s flexible and subtext-heavy dialogue and the hypocrisy of the characters. But oh, how practised we have become at adopting that absurdity ourselves in these times of environmental crisis, totalitarian threats, political buffoonery and the widespread impulse to laugh through our existential pain.
Fortunately, Greece-based director Thomas Moschopoulos waits until the final two chapters of this 90-minute collection of short Pinter plays to drive this relevance home.
The Press Conference, written in 2002, casts Diego Matamoros as a brutally honest secret police head turned minister for culture answering questions from journalists, matter-offactly describing the government’s war crimes and cultural genocide. That’s followed by Apart From That, Pinter’s last work from 2006, in which two of the attending journalists (Maev Beaty and Alex McCooeye) can’t find words to describe the political climate or, it’s suggested, their personal history.
Moschopoulos and his four actors — Gregory Prest, Matamoros, Beaty and the criminally underseen McCooeye — un- derstand that angling their performances toward severity, sharpness and gravity is the key to the humour and Pinter’s cultural criticism.
Emotions rise and fall fast, intentions are direct and, although the actors’ physicality might sometimes soften, it’s not without a clear choice. The joke is how one person’s strong perspective doesn’t connect with the other’s or doesn’t connect with the audience’s.
From Shannon Lea Doyle’s blank set of white walls and clear acrylic frames, to Simon Rossiter’s lighting to the performances, even the procedural precision of a midshow set change, there is no room for fluidity in this production. The only murkiness lies within the text itself.
Although it’s easy to skate through the short scenes, Little Menace finds a unique journey in the slow, strange, alternately terrifying and divine Victoria Station, in which Matamoros’ short-fused taxi dispatcher communicates with McCooeye’s bewildered driver, who doesn’t seem to know where he is, the purpose of his job or even who’s speaking to him.
Pinter’s script fuses mundane confusion with an all-encompassing sense of helplessness, with the power balance shifting in unsettling ways until its upsetting conclusion. It’s one of the play’s longer duets, and McCooeye in particular strikes an otherworldly presence against Matamoros’ explosions of deep-rooted anger.
The longest play is actually a screenplay, Pinter’s 1967 fourhander The Basement, which involves a love triangle, a battle between friends for a basement apartment and a woman, and a godlike guide reading the stage directions.
Its dismantling of control and agency is fitting, but it bogs down the pace of Little Menace and oversexualizes Beaty as Jane, the paramour shared between Stott (Prest) and Law (McCooeye).
As the sole female performer, Beaty is often portrayed as a person desired by the men, slinking around the stage in menswear and, in one scene, her underwear, leaning on a table with her backside facing the audience. With so much contextual openness in Pinter’s texts, it’s disappointing that Beaty would be relegated to such stereotypical roles while her male castmates get to fight, strategize, cry and ponder.