‘Pinter Two’ review

If you thought the plays of Harold Pinter were all cryptic menace and existential terror... well, yes, they are. But after the ferocious intensity of ‘Pinter One’, director Jamie Lloyd eases off the gas for the lighter second part of his epic Pinter at the Pinter season.

Lloyd actually directed a bill of 1961's ‘The Lover’ and 1962's ‘The Collection’ a decade ago at this same theatre, with some of the same team. I’m not sure ten years off his helped him make the case for them as great plays. But they’re interesting plays, and their pairing makes sense: here they’re recognisably comedies, a real contrast to the burning horrors of ‘Pinter One’.

Best of the two is ‘The Lover’, which is kind of like a sex comedy having a breakdown. Grinning fixedly on Soutra Gilmour’s acid bright set, Richard (John Macmillan) and Sarah (Hayley Squires) are a married couple, apparently happily so. As Sarah explains, she will be having her lover over this afternoon. Richard brightly agrees to make sure he’s out. As it soon transpires, however, the lover is in fact Richard again. Squires’s unflappable Sarah has no problem with this, but it’s clearly getting to Richard, who becomes increasingly morose and irritable, unwilling to adopt his alter ego.

I suppose Pinter is possibly saying something serious and potentially a touch cringey about the differences between male and female psychology, but there’s enough of the old enigma to stop Lloyd’s garish take feeling like it’s preaching. It’s more compelling as a scenario than a parable, and that’s fine. Squires and Macmillan’s stylized performances are excellent, funny, but just a hair’s breadth from hysteria.

‘The Collection’ is a more complicated and less successful play, which Lloyd has treated like a brooding brother to a Joe Orton farce. Harry (David Suchet) and Bill (Russell Tovey) live together. The nature of their relationship is never quite made clear, but certainly Lloyd’s production heartily infers that it’s sexual, if only sporadically so. One day James (Macmillan again) turns up to accuse the bluff but camp Bill of sleeping with his wife Stella (Squires)... but James’s interest in Bill seems to go beyond revenge. 

Lloyd has imposed a queer reading that makes sense out of ‘The Collection’, albeit at the cost of some of its mystery. The top notch cast do a good job of wringing laughs out of it: Suchet has the room cracking up with every waspish utterance, and Tovey is the epitome of insouciant charm.

Look: I don’t particularly want my Pinter light and accessible, and for me ‘Pinter Two’ felt like a bit of a step down from from the brooding heights of ‘Pinter One’. You may feel the opposite. Whatever the case, there’s something for everyone.