Menacingly double-edged version of a Miller’s tale
Simon Higlett’s design festoons the room with more furniture than you can shake a stick at. And it is here that Solomon appears as if part of the running joke in Simon’s Barefoot in the Park. In that play — also set on a Manhattan top floor — everybody who makes it up the stairs is too exhausted to talk. In Miller’s, Lithuanian-born Solomon declines an offer of water with one of the best opening lines for a character there is. “Water I don’t need. A little blood I could use.” But it is in the second act that the play peels back the comforting myths constructed by Victor and Walter that make life easier to live.
The process is a relentless, exposing of uncomfortable truths — in Walter’s case that he betrayed his brother much more than he has cared to admit; in Victor’s, that no one but he is responsible for the decisions he made and the diminished life that followed.
Suchet terrifically reveals Solomon’s own hidden truth; that, to him, the furniture is more than an opportunity to make a deal. It’s a lifeline. And, as the straight-talking policeman, Coyle is equally good at conveying the repressed resentment for the opportunities missed. It is a truth beautifully illustrated early on when this bruiser of a policeman plucks a cultured note on his mother’s old harp. Nice touch. Harold Pinter Theatre
The best has been saved until last. Jamie Lloyd’s six month-long season of Pinter shorts has sometimes felt more like an experiment than a showcase of talent. Some of the sketches feel crushingly dated. More problematically still, the later political works have as much nous as student agitprop. In fact, I never quite understood why it was so generally accepted that Pinter used his Nobel Prize for literature to trot his frankly pretty uninteresting political insights as if he had won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Still, at his best, his plays are brilliant. And these two, early, one-act comedies of menace reveal a gathering dramatic voice of mesmerising potency. Director Jamie Lloyd’s staging of A Slight Ache (1958) reveals that that two-hander was written for radio.
As upper-class country couple Flora and Edward, Gemma Whelan and John Heffernan sit on stools like actors in a sound studio. An On Air sign above glows red. Their conversation is classic, clipped decorum until it turns to the disturbing figure of a hooded matchseller outside their garden gate.
The work is as funny and disturbing as the better known play that follows it. In The Dumb Waiter, Danny Dyer and Martin Freeman are paired as two hitmen who wait for instructions in the basement of a disused house. Freeman is all nerves, Dyer, coiled aggression. The dialogue is pure Tarantino, and the Black Mirror-style climax to each of these works reveal a Pinter decades ahead of his time.