JOHN NATHAN
Harold Pinter Theatre
DON’T GET me wrong, I’m a fan of Harold Pinter. He wrote some of the finest dramas of the last century and in this ambitious season of the Nobel Laureate’s lesser known, one-act plays, sketches and poems there are real gems. The third and fourth sections of Jamie Lloyd’s starry season, performed on separate evenings, opens with a two-hander called Landscape (1969) in which Tamsin Greig plays a woman who escapes an abusive relationship (with Keith Allen’s Duff) by immersing herself in the memories of a happier past. It’s a beautifully performed piece that allows the circumstances of the couple to gracefully, if tragically, emerge.
Yet there are duds. In the tongue-in-cheek Special Offer (1959) Meera Syal as a secretary considers an offer to sexually exploit men.
The sketch may have been relatively enlightened for the time, but the knowing wink with which it ends is an embarrassingly hoary old payoff.
Granted, the sketches are coming thick and fast by now and if you don’t like one it’s not long to wait for the next. That’s All (1959) a duologue featuring two gossipy women presages Les Dawson and Roy Baraclough’s sketches in drag. Here a bewigged Allen and Lee Evans play Mrs A and B. It would have been tediously has-been were it not for the decision to add a third silent woman (Tom Edden) which allows Evans to riff with a series of increasingly wary double-takes at Edden’s deadpan woman in the way that only Evans can.
The comedian — a much underused acting talent — provides the antidote to much of Pinter’s leaden irony here. In Trouble in the Works (1959) he plays a union steward much like Peter
Sellers’s in the film
I’m All Right Jack (also
1959). Meanwhile, in Monologue
(1973), Evans superbly conveys the involuntary solitude of a man who directs his conversation to a past friend at an empty chair. Collectively, some of these works reveal little-seen facets of the man whose best works are masterpieces. And granted, there is an undoubted value for Pinter aficionados here. For example, the misremembering middle-aged couple in Night (1969) reveals a surprisingly romantic side. But the case for reviving Night School (1979) about the homecoming of a small-time crook who is released from prison and finds that his mum and aunt (Brid Brennan and Janie Dee) have rented his room out to a young woman, is hardly convincing. And even the unrelentingly bleak A Kind of Alaska in which Greig plays a woman whose mind has been buried alive in a coma — a piece that was inspired by Oliver Sacks’s book Awakenings — is unremittingly bleak. It’s as if the cult of admiration that has grown around Pinter is incapable of being discerning about his work. Though written in his late middle-age, much of the political stuff revived in the first two sections of the season amounts to little more than adolescent agitprop. The sense is that if Pinter had written the weather forecast it would have got an airing here.