Just shy of 60 years after it was first critically mauled in London, Harold Pinter’s second and breakthrough play is revived at the theatre which now bears his name. Ian Rickson’s virtually all-star production is the best I have seen on stage.

As Stanley Webber, an alleged former pianist now in hiding, or just washed up in a tatty seaside boarding house of sorts... forgive me, but this piece really established the Pinter signature mode whereby pretty much everything is “allegedly” or “of sorts”... anyway, Toby Jones shines a new light on the character. So often Stanley is seen as constantly on the back foot, only occasionally scoring petty points for himself by, for instance, sniping at landlady Meg; Jones, however, brings a palpable streak of viciousness to him. When mysterious, menacing (that Pinter trademark again) new arrivals Goldberg and McCann shepherd the now broken-down Stanley out at the end, it is not just their earlier interrogation of him which suggests that they may be returning him to an “organisation” he had quit; this Stanley, his verbal fencing with Goldberg a match of equals, has already suggested that he might all too plausibly fit in there, wherever “there” is.

Zoë Wanamaker entirely subsumes herself in Meg’s vapidity, an ageing coquette with an undercurrent of loneliness. Stephen Mangan’s Goldberg is virtually the equal of Pinter’s own in a 1987 BBC-TV version: the threats are seldom explicit, yet still visible through the threadbare bonhomous reminiscences (or blather). He also does a nice line in what might be called sardonic listening. The cast is completed by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as a refreshingly insecure McCann, Pearl Mackie shaking off her Doctor Who status as vampish but abused neighbour Lulu and Peter Wight as Meg’s comfortably nondescript husband Petey, who nevertheless gets what Pinter identified as the most significant line of the play if not his entire oeuvre: “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do!”

You can almost smell the mildew on the Brothers Quay’s set, but also in the various characters’ talk of their respective good old days. For once the play is not just about the shapeless present and looming future, but also the elusive past.

Written for the Financial Times.