Comics Thom Tuck, Simon Munnery and Catriona Knox fail to give pause for thought in this dismal revival of Harold Pinter's 1959 radio short. Set on midsummer's day in the garden of middle-aged, middle-class Flora (Knox) and Edward (Tuck), the play is so stuffed full of early Pinter tropes, menacing strangers, pauses and suppressed violence, that it risks falling into parody. It does here.
That's not to say that the play lacks power: the first scene is a minor masterpiece as the couple's apparently idyllic breakfast is ruined by a wasp in the marmalade whose demise is orchestrated with a methodical, genteel savagery that would make Pol Pot look like a poppet.
It's clear that there is trouble in paradise, and the tensions, seething resentments and power struggles that are brewing come to a head when the mute match-seller, (Munnery) who has apparently been standing at the couple's garden gate for months, is invited into the house.
In the radio play, the listener never knows whether the match-seller really exists or is merely imagined by the couple. That ambiguity is lost on stage and the play becomes flat and far less intriguing when the match-seller actually appears. The danger imagined is often far more terrifying than the danger made manifest.
A far better production might have compensated elsewhere, but this revival feels as if it's been thrown together with very little thought. The play's precise postwar social milieu is never captured in its costumes and accents, and while Knox's Flora, whose bland smile hides something far more terrifying, has her moments, the performances and production never get to grips with the heightened naturalism of the drama.
• To 25 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000. Venue: Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh.
