Pinter at his poisonous best
Takes in at the beginning of a season dedicated to the theatrical colossus
Ten years after Harold Pinter died, British theatre is paying its collective respects to the play-writing colossus by worshipping his miniatures. Pinter at the Pinter – curated and principally directed by Jamie Lloyd – unleashes an ambitious, six-month salute at the theatre where many of his finest works have been staged, and took his name in 2011.
In an unprecedented splurge, all his one-act plays will be showcased, across successive mini-seasons, with bankable actors including Martin Freeman, Tamsin Greig and Meera Syal along the way. It’s a big gamble to mount such a deluxe box-set bonanza. There are deals for the under-30s and for those booking in bulk but even an ardent Pinter punter might balk at paying £92 for a “Pinter package” stalls seat – notwithstanding the champagne-socialist glass of bubbly.
The double-bill of The Lover (1962) and The Collection (1961) – mounted by Lloyd here 10 years ago – is the most arresting and entertaining of the opening round of pint-size playlets. This early work ( Pinter Two) will run alongside a cluster of skits, poems and oddities ( Pinter One), affording a thematic contrast: “Sex” in the Sixties exploits, “Politics” in the grim later endeavours – mostly written after the collapse of communism. Except that in Pinter, those blur. Sex is indivisible from power-play, the exercise of power bound up with primal urges.
Fascinating though the points of connection are, there’s little disguising the fact that when Pinter was closest to his Hackney youth, he was on fire as a writer. In his far-frommellow maturity, blazing with furious indignation about American foreign policy, he verges on becoming hackneyed. Those strapped for cash or time – or patience for satirical didacticism – should beeline for the quintessential early exemplars of his fabled “comedy of menace”.
In The Lover we see a suburbanite couple – Richard and Sarah – who seem to operate their lives according to the Proustian sentiment (summarised by Alain de Botton) that “an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit”. Richard goes off to work, Sarah stays at home; when he returns, she updates him on the visit from her lover. He cheerily retaliates in kind, alluding to his dalliance with his mistress.
As subsequent scenes make briskly clear, the pair have spiced things up by role-playing as adulterers, deriving delight from using these personae to talk about their “real” selves. Except this talk is loaded with the dangerous suggestion of real adulterous intent, and the more Richard tries to wriggle out, the more Sarah ensnares him. It’s performed with tremendous brio by John Macmillan and Hayley Squires. Lloyd underlines, through excessively mannered period accents and the overtly artificial set, that there’s not a jot of space into which affectation hasn’t crept; yet it is affecting all the Pinter One, same. After the interval The Collection serves as another invaluable Pinter primer – introducing us to the lethal deadpan, the tactical enigma, the warring (and fragile) masculinity and the toxic civilised veneer he made his stock-in-trade. Macmillan excels again as James, a married man who tracks down Bill (an impressively impassive and insouciantly alpha Russell Tovey) – whom he believes has had a fling with his wife (Hayley Squires’s Stella).
As the men square up, something stirs between them, which serves to antagonise and entice the older, barely closeted, implicitly predatory male – Harry – with whom Bill lodges. It all has a terrific proto Orton-esque loucheness to it; and David Suchet is a hoot as the sinister Harry, snapping every syllable, a querulous dandy-poseur.
As for the “political”, the plethora of curios throw up less an embarrassment of riches than the odd embarrassment of heavy-handedness. Yet it’s redeemed by Antony Sher as Nicolas, a ruthless official and adept psychological torturer who interrogates a dissident and his family in One for the Road (1984).
Mixing frailty, friendliness and nastiness to perfection, Sher’s subtle, pained looks offer a hint that Pinter harboured a sentimental attachment to the idea that the wicked suffer inwardly while the morally superior may yet inherit the Earth.
Until Oct 20. Tickets: 0844 871 7622; pinteratthepinter.com