THE HOTHOUSE. To 27 October.

London

THE HOTHOUSE
by Harold Pinter.

Lyttelton Theatre In rep to27 October 2007.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 12 Sept, 6,27 Oct 2.15pm.
Audio-described 25,27 Oct 2.15pm.
Captioned 27 Oct 7.30pm.
Runs 2hr 25min One interval.

TICKETS: 020 7452 3000.
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 1 September.

Chilling comedy in drama of The Hothouse
This is the third outing for Harold Pinter’s 1958 play. The first was as late as 1980, in Hampstead, the second at Chichester’s Minerva in 1995. Now it’s on the Lyttelton’s stage, vaster than the other two together. Hildegard Bechtler’s two-storey set contains areas that are little, or never, used, a visual position strangely at odds with the play’s conciseness.

Yet it allows a remoteness between characters which physically parallels their ever-suspicious relationships. And Bechtler’s set provides a panoramic window through which Stephen Moore’s Roote, top-dog of the monosyllabic character-list, observes chill Christmas snow falling outside the hothouse.

Which is an institutional home, by implication a euphemistically-named ‘rest-home’ for forcibly-detained malcontents. Staff actions occasion life and death among the numbered inmates, its concealment or revelation being part of the knowledge-is-power-game made starkly funny by Stephen Moore’s initially affable-seeming Roote. Even his put-downs come in an easygoing voice spread over a barbed base, his bluff manner catching the unwary. And he’s aware his subordinate apparatchiks are following him closely up the greasy pole.

There’s little unwariness immediately around him, whether from Finbar Lynch’s sleek, slick-haired Gibbs, prompt agreement covering his own game-plan, or the undermining suggestiveness of Paul Ritter’s Lush, a finely-styled example of high-class insolence.

Then there’s Lia Williams' Miss Cutts, sole female, silently and sexily enigmatic. Why speak when a smart figure smartly-dressed creates a stir in this otherwise-male hothouse? And Lamb, driven aptly enough to the slaughter as the meek one without a partially-concealed personal agenda. It’s his surprise interrogation on the apparent climb to the organisation’s higher echelons that Pinter extracted as a review sketch, and seems now to have revised.

Ian Rickson’s production has the right focused intensity, a sense of silence that goes with the unspoken implications around the laconic speech, disturbed by the violence of a drink repeatedly thrown in someone’s face in response to repeated insubordination or the growing offstage rumblings of inmate discontent. Ultimately though, the inmates remain background rumblings; it’s the unspoken hostility and manipulation among the staff that suggest how power-play throughout a wider society leads to this hothouse’s existence.

Roote: Stephen Moore.
Gibbs: Finbar Lynch.
Lamb: Leo Bill.
Miss Cutts: Lia Williams.
Lush: Paul Ritter.
Tubb: Henry Woolf.
Lobb: Peter Pacey.

Director: Ian Rickson.
Designer: Hildegard Bechtler.
Lighting: Peter Mumford.
Sound: Ian Dickinson.
Music: Stephen Warbeck.
Movement: Scott Graham/Steven Hoggett for Frantic Assembly
Dialect coach: Joan Washington.
Company voice work: Kate Godfrey.

2007-09-15 11:38:11