The best way to honour a dramatist is to perform him. And, in advance of next week's Nobel prize-giving, the Gate Theatre Dublin has brought over the star-studded, staged reading of Harold Pinter's Celebration that was a recent hit on home soil. The result is a timely reminder of Pinter's Dickensian eye for human oddity and ability to mix social satire and sense of life's mystery.
All the action takes place in a swish London restaurant where two coarse-grained strategy consultants are dining with their respective wives. At an adjacent table a banker and his wife banter over his recently discovered affair. But while Pinter gets a lot of laughs out of these gold-plated philistines, he also suggests they are displaced people. Shorn of any inherited values, they live in an eternal present of sex, food and conspicuous consumption.
But what lifts this 50-minute piece into another realm is the intrusive presence of a Waiter played with looming intensity by Stephen Rea. If the diners have no cultural roots, he seems afflicted by an excess of them as he reminisces about a grandad who apparently knew everyone from WB Yeats to the Beverley Sisters.
But for all his buttonholing eccentricity, the Waiter has access to a world of family and feeling denied to the grandstanding diners.
Dangerous, however, to get too solemn about a piece that reminds us Pinter has always been a comic writer. And Alan Stanford's neatly organised production rides along on a wave of laughter.
Michael Gambon is outrageous as a bullish peace enforcer who can scarcely say a civil word to Penelope Wilton as his sardonically subversive wife. Janie Dee also raises the temperature several notches as she taunts Jeremy Irons' faithless husband with memories of her own "saucy, flirty, giggly" younger self.
And Charles Dance and Joanna Lumley preside over the clientele as if they were running an upmarket therapy centre. Two more chances only to catch a play that reminds us that Pinter has always been one of the great piss-takers.
· Ends tomorrow. Box office: 0870 950 0920.
