PARTY TIME/ ONE FOR THE ROAD: Harold Pinter
Battersea Arts Centre: Tckts 020 7223 2223
Runs: 1hr 25m: one interval
7.30pm, Sun 5.50pm
Review: Kim Durham 30th July
A short but richly satisfying evening. Two masterly Pinter shorts well served by a diamond sharp production
This is theatre as muscularly economic as you are likely to see.
Bijan Sheibani, winner of the James Menzies-Kitchin Memorial award for young directors, has elected to bring together these two short overtly political Pinter plays for the first time and it is a welcome choice. This is anything but flashy director's theatre, rather a poised, spare and controlled presentation of the taughtest of theatrical writing and a shrewd pairing.
In the first of the two, an elegant gathering of the rich and powerful discuss health clubs and golf, whilst outside, in the streets, some sort of emergency is taking place, referred to only obliquely by the party guests.
There is much self-congratulatory talk of civilization and morality, yet, as we expect from Pinter, the air crackles with tension and suppressed violence.
In the chilling encounters that comprise One for the Road, an interrogator serially questions a dissident and his family. With its sustained tone of urbane menace, this is an Orwellian tour de force.
Sheibani's clean-limbed and exceptionally well-cast production brings into sharp focus Pinter's genius for demonstrating the extraordinarily deceptive power of language. Party Time, particularly, though written in 1991, precisely skewers our current political discourse, with words deployed as tools both of deception and self-deception.
While the duties of leadership are proclaimed with high moral conviction and a touch of humility and who does that remind you of both writer and actors subtly show the iron will to power beneath the cultivated mask.
The more direct depiction of the brutality of power in One for the Road cleverly is made one with the apparent bonhomie of the first part of the evening by the use of the same actor as victim of the regime in both plays.
Here the explicit exercising of power is made gruesomely playful, with Colin McCormack's Nicolas relishing his control over his hapless victims - a very nasty portrayal, made all the more horrific by the mask of avuncular solicitousness with which much of it is played.
This is a short evening that is nevertheless richly satisfying and genuinely disturbing.
PARTY TIME
Waitress: Helen Sadler/ Mary Ann Scott
Douglas: Paul Cawley
Melissa: Maria Charles
Liz: Clare Francis
Dusty: Bettrys Jones
Charlotte: Kristin Hutchinson
Gavin: Colin McCormack
Fred: Robert Styles
Terry: Paul Wyatt
Jimmy: Jason Barnett
ONE FOR THE ROAD
Nicolas: Colin McCormack
Victor: Jason Barnett
Gila: Kristin Hutchinson
Nicky: Kadell Herida/ Shakir Joseph
Director: Bijan Sheibani
Designer: Paul Burgess
Lighting: Guy Kornetzki
Sound: Emma Laxton
Production Manager: Daisy O'Flynn
Producer: Abigail Gonda
2003-07-30 13:45:09