A double bill of Pinter’s disturbing sex games
The Lover/The Collection (Ustinov Studio, Bath) Verdict: Two helpings of vintage Pinter ★★★★✩
ACCORDING to Larkin, sexual intercourse began in 1963, but by then Harold Pinter’s characters were already adept at playing the games, playful and savage, that make and break intimate relationships. As Lindsay Posner’s expertly performed double-bill of early Sixties miniatures proves.
‘Is your lover coming today?’ David Morrissey’s respectable city gent, Richard, casually asks his wife Sarah as he goes off to work. It’s the first sentence of The Lover. The joke is that it is Richard who returns as Max and unzips his suede jacket for some afternoon delight, climaxing under the tea table.
A supercool, calm Claudie Blakley effortlessly slips from prim and proper Sarah’s cotton frock into the velvet sheath and shiny black stilettoes of the raunchy mistress. For her, this is a ‘beautifully balanced’ arrangement. But Hubby finds the
bleeding messily into his domestic life and wants it to stop.
In the final image, Sarah kneels above her husband. In charge once again? I think so. But this is Pinter. Ambiguity is everything.
IN THE Collection, the betrayal is for real. Or is it? We shall never know what actually happened at a dress designers’ bash in Leeds when Bill (Elliot Barnes-Worrell) met Stella (Claudie Blakley). Bill’s older lover (a superbly reedy-voiced, querulous, smoking-jacketed Morrissey) is suspicious that his ‘slum-slug’ toy-boy may be playing away with a woman. But he is much more agitated to see Stella’s husband James (Mathew Horne) flirting with insolent Bill.
A bob-haired Stella, glued to her gorgeous white cat at the back of the stage, is too far away to read clearly. Though there’s no doubting her composure.
Much more than a period piece, the consistent unpredictability and deliciously slippery tone make this a tense, timeless, if disturbing, delight. With girls on top.