When you are promised an Evening of Pinter, what does it portend? The word “menace” is commonly attached to his strange, wordy dramas, in which it emerges that people who are apparently ordinary and living in ordinary, even mundane circumstances are standing on the thin ice of despair and disintegration
You certainly don’t expect a life-affirming evening of uproarious fun and frolics, even if there are occasional hints of wry humour and linguistic playfulness. And the sequence of four playlets presented by the Thespians at the LBT is – to use an adjective that has made it into the OED – thoroughly Pinteresque. We don’t get many of the long pauses that are also deemed to be a Pinter characteristic, but the other elements are present and correct.
In “Landscape”, directed by Keith Royston, an elderly couple (Wendy Smith and Kenneth Greenwood), whom we take to be husband and wife, conduct parallel reminiscences which begin to hint at tragedy, disappointment and disillusion.
“Victoria Station”, directed by Prue Griffiths, is a conversation between an increasingly exasperated minicab controller (Matthew Fairhead) and a driver (Michael Sutton) who seems to exist in a different, dreamlike dimension.
“Family Voices”, directed by Lynne Whitaker, is a sequence of recited letters written between but never received by a mother (Christine Davies) and her son (Joe Geddes) , who is living in the bedsit from hell that might indeed be hell. A demonic father figure (Jonathan Sharp) adds to this interpretation.
“The Lover”, also directed by Keith Royston, seems to lighten the mood, beginning as a kind of Noel Coward pastiche, as a couple (Dean Robson and Poppy Stahelin) display a free and frank attitude to extra marital relationships. But this turns out to be possibly the most structurally complex playlet of the lot, with overtones of emotional and physical cruelty in addition to inscrutable questions of identity.
The four playlets exhibit another key Pinter characteristic. Most other writers, having devised and developed their strange scenarios, would furnish some kind of narrative resolution, or twist in the tale. Two of the mini-dramas, for example, could have had a supernatural pay-off. Oh, they were ghosts all along!
But that is definitely not Pinter’s way. We either provide our own explanations or simply leave the dramas playing on in the infinity of imagination.
The acting standards in this Evening of Pinter are uniformly good, with the naturalism adopted by most of the actors serving the material very well. The staging is minimalistic but effective – especially atmospheric in “Victoria Station”, where the faces of the two actors are bathed in an eerie glow.
This is a good Pinter primer – very effective in the intensity of the LBT Cellar - and it runs until Saturday, when there is also a matinee.
