Director Jamie Lloyd’s twin strengths
sit oddly together: musicals and Pinter. One can argue that the
nuancing of the latter’s work in performance is akin to musical timing
and choreography, but it seems a tad sophistical. Nevertheless, to
Lloyd’s music-theatre successes as Michael Grandage’s lieutenant on
Evita and
Guys And Dolls was added, just over
a year ago, a lauded production of
The
Caretaker at Sheffield, which later toured including a stint at
the Tricycle in London, and now this double bill. The pieces (running
about 50 minutes each in Lloyd’s staging) were last seen in the West
End a decade ago at the Donmar along with the later
A Kind Of Alaska, but these two
date from the period of Pinter’s first full flowering.
The Collection (1961) is in
many respects
essence de
Pinter. The crucial event, before the action opens, is an adulterous
tryst between Stella (Gina McKee) and Bill (Charlie Cox) in a hotel in
Leeds. Stella’s husband James interrogates Bill, who gives a number of
differing accounts and strikes up a relationship by turns cordial and
antagonistic with him; Bill’s older mentor Harry visits Stella and then
throws the account he has gleaned into the stew.
Anyone familiar with Pinter will be completely unsurprised at the
confusions and contradictions, nor will they turn a hair at the
characters’ unexplained abilities to track one another down to their
respective homes. The sudden, enigmatic arrival is a keynote of the
playwright’s work, as is the ever-shifting flux of power-play between
the men. Unlike her counterpart in
The
Homecoming a few years later, Stella does not really have a
power vector of her own here; she is a pretext for the dance of the
other three. Timothy West is on solid form as Harry, Charlie Cox is
assured in only his second professional stage production and Richard
Coyle never less than compelling as James. Ultimately, though, the
piece feels less than seminal, and something of an anticlimax after the
first half of the evening.
For
The Lover is no less
strange and scarcely less shocking now than it must have been on its
television première in 1963. We may be more familiar with sexual
roleplay both in drama and in private life, but the unsettlement of
voyeurism remains, even before that Pinterian uncertainty kicks in at
full strength. We watch Coyle and McKee as Richard and Sarah exchange
bourgeois banter about their respective afternoon bits on the side –
her “lover”, his “whore” – and then an encounter which reveals that
this is an adultery fantasy (or a nexus of them) that the couple engage
in to keep their twin-bedded marriage a-simmer.
McKee dons her slinky black dress and high heels with a fetishistic
luxuriance, then she and Coyle as “Max” seduce each other by pattering
on a pair of bongos between them; it sounds absurd, but is electric in
performance, and of course symbolises the primitive in contrast to
their self-consciously blithe exchanges
in propriis personis earlier. When
“Max” declares that he is breaking off the affair, and Richard a little
later similarly commands Sarah to end it, we feel a kind of horror at
the upheaval, and cannot miss the desperation and even fatalism in the
new settlement the couple arrive at.
McKee and Coyle command rapt if uncomfortable attention at every
instant. Lloyd brings out in them an awareness that each line is a
gambit, whether as husband, wife, lover or slut, and that this is an
improvisation where virtually everything is at stake. It is not just
gripping, but gripping in intimate and sensitive areas.
Written for the Financial
Times.