Great acting devoted to Harold
Dominic Cavendish goes to see Pinter Three and Pinter Four at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London
Everywhere you look at the Harold Pinter Theatre, there are photos of the great man, in varying attitudes of imposing seriousness. The disconcerting impression is of being inside a mausoleum – and a further, allied impression is of the suffocating potential of all that prestige. It’s as if the building is reaffirming the reputational pressure under which Pinter sweated.
Jamie Lloyd’s exhaustive season of Pinter’s short works is proving ever more fascinating. Increasingly, it’s as though you’re being ushered inside the many-roomed mansion of Pinter’s mind – it’s all one big opus. The mood might be throwaway comic or protractedly dark, the writing pin-sharp or off-key, yet the overhanging light-bulb of flickering doubt is a constant: the world outside is unreliable, and the world within equally so. Groping for words, Pinter turned creative isolation into existential statement.
Around the time of Landscape (first staged in 1969), which launches Pinter Three, he said: “I found some 1950 poems of mine recently; I was astonished by the freedom I had, the energy… I can’t write that way anymore. I’m 37 now. I feel as if I’m 80.” Yet that sense of decrepitude, difficulty and disconnection from one’s younger self imbues this eerie two-hander with a nerve-jangling vitality.
In a country house kitchen, sitting in a state of dreamy self-possession, Tamsin Greig plays a woman (Beth) casting her mind back to a hot summer’s day on the sand dunes when she asked the man lying at her side whether he would like a baby. Lloyd has Greig talk into a microphone, while near at hand Keith Allen’s gruff, cockney Duff (possibly that man) recounts banalities, makes half-overtures and boils with exasperation on a lonely hob. It’s as if, without moving, they’re locked in a chase – coarsened, abusive masculinity in pursuit of a female quarry who moves ever further into an other-worldly interior.
Greig is very fine here but exceptionally so in the revival that concludes the evening. In A Kind of
Alaska (1982) she takes the role of Deborah, who wakes from decades of near-paralytic slumber, no longer a girl but clinging to that evaporating girlhood identity as the reality dawns. The play was drawn from Oliver Sacks’s 1973 book Awakenings, with its case-studies of patients brought out of the psychophysical hibernation caused by a sleeping-sickness epidemic thanks to the drug L-DOPA.
Sitting up in bed, Greig is a turning kaleidoscope of childlike wonder, droll disinhibition and scrabbling panic, watched (with a touch too much clinical detachment) by Allen’s doctor, with Meera Syal all tacit agony as her sister. “It’s a vast series of halls,” Greig’s revenant explains.
“With enormous interior windows masquerading as walls. The windows are mirrors, you see. And so glass reflects glass. For ever and ever.” In that terrifying vignette, you glimpse not just a singular state of mind but a description of consciousness.
Lee Evans bestows his hilarious gifts for simian posturing, quick gurns and blank looks on a flurry of enjoyable skits and a haunting piece,
Monologue, in which a solitary male addresses mock-jaunty remarks at an empty chair standing in for an absent other, apparently an old friend-cum-sexual rival. “I keep busy in the mind, and that’s why I’m still sparking,” he jeers, ’twixt arrogant brag and total breakdown.
Pinter Four is the weaker of the mixed-bills this month. It consists of a revival of that peculiar quasi-deathbed reverie Moonlight (1993) directed by Lyndsey Turner, which features dialogue so self-conscious it almost sounds like pastiche and a cryptic aspect even the Bletchley Park codebreakers would have been pushed to crack. The Ed Stambollouian-directed Night School (1979), about a young fraudster newly released from prison, who fixates on the young woman who has taken over his bedroom at the invitation of his aunts, is barely less puzzling. But it’s equally well served by the actors.
My, how our British actors love Pinter. That devotion is something wholly stirring and inspiring to witness.
Until Dec 8. Tickets; 0844 871 7622; pinteratthepinter.com