THE LOVER & THE COLLECTION.
London.
THE LOVER, THE COLLECTION
by Harold Pinter.
Comedy Theatre
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed & Sat 2.30pm.
Runs 2hr 10min One interval.
TICKETS: 0870 060 6637.
www.theambassadors.com/comedy (£2.50 transaction charge by ‘phone & online; top two prices reduced online).
Review: Timothy Ramsden 9 February.
Expresso bongos accompanies secret love-life and past secrets take the stage.
It says a lot for Harold Pinter’s stature that these old TV plays hit the West End in a double-bill. Their impact differs, but both inhabit his vivid, enigmatic world.
The Lover, 1963, ought to appear dated. A year earlier, radio dramatist Giles Cooper, in a rare theatrical outing, had stripped suburban respectability bare with Everything in the Garden, where part-time prostitution sustains the affluent society. But Pinter digs deeper, showing respectability unable to satisfy human desires.
While his theatre plays still inhabited shabby locations, The Lover is set in spacious commuter-land. After a quick joke about the milkman (muffled by positioning of the front-door, and the decline of milk-deliveries as a fact of life) it becomes clear the wife’s lover is her husband’s alter ego, his question about whether her lover will call actually an invite to their liberating game.
The point’s made through costume, as Gina KcKee’s Sarah switches from the fortress-like elegance of her wifely clothes to something more pliant and sexy, expression and movement loosening as she does so. And in props, drumbeats on a breast-like pair of bongos hotting the pace with rhythmic taps.
The Collection (1962), where truth’s turned into what people want to believe, seems more obvious, though the pull of male to male refracts with later Pinters like The Homecoming and Betrayal.
Soutra Gilmour’s design collects The Collection’s various settings on stage, around the red ‘phone-box from which the opening 4am call’s made, beginning the interruptions to several lives. With characters visible simultaneously in two rooms, it now recalls Alan Ayckbourn’s use of simultaneity in How the Other Half Loves a decade later, a reference thematically apt yet incongruous given that play’s more self-conscious use of the device.
Still, it’s worth seeing, and The Lover certainly so. Both are well-acted, though among the lads’ relationships it’s the lass who stands out. McKee’s sleeping silence is eloquent at The Collection’s end, while in the first play her growing anxiety as she attempts to hold the fraying distinction between fantasy and fact (recalling Edward Albee’s Virginia Woolf) gives The Lover an impressively human face.
The Lover
Richard: Richard Coyle.
Sarah: Gina KcKee.
John: Charlie Cox.
The Collection
Harry: Timothy West.
James: Richard Coyle.
Stella: Gina McKee.
Bill: Charlie Cox.
Director: Jamie Lloyd.
Designer: Soutra Gilmour.
Lighting: Jon Clark.
Sound;/Music Ben Ringham., Max Ringham.
Voice coach: Jeanette Nelson.
Fight director: Brett Yount.
Associate director: Cat Totty.
Assistant sound: Sean Ephgrave.
2008-02-14 11:21:49