Royal Court, London
Rating ****
Dogs howl. Bells clang. Helicopter blades whirr. Katie Mitchell's production of Mountain Language - the first part of a Harold Pinter double bill - opens with an aural assault clangorously conjured up by Gareth Fry.
Although it's good to see the play again, I'm not sure Mitchell's approach sends out the right signals: it smacks of police-state cliche.
Mountain Language was partly inspired in 1988 by Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language. But Pinter was at pains to point out that the play was also about the threat to our own democratic institutions.
Mitchell's production returns it to a nightmare world of them rather than us; Pinter's focus on the arbitrary appropriation of language by the heavy-handed state is almost lost amid the scenic effects and tumultuous sound.
You certainly get a sense of military panic as a woman, venturing down the wrong corridor, is confronted by a hooded, semi-naked man; what I miss is the dry routine of daily oppression.
Ashes to Ashes, a richly disturbing play first staged in 1996, fares much better in Mitchell's assured hands. Two characters, Rebecca and Devlin, confront each other in a lamplit room. He, insecure like all Pinter males, naggingly probes her about a past lover; gradually it emerges that the lover was not just sexually dominating but a high-level fascist functionary.
By an almost imperceptible transference, Rebecca enters into the soul of one of his victims - a mother whose baby is taken from her as she boards a train for the camps.
Suggested, I suspect, by Albert Speer's affair with a married German expatriate, Pinter's play goes far beyond that to raise any number of haunting questions. One, obviously, is whether there is some strange sexual magnetism about men implicated in cruelty.
The play also asks how any man can function as both adoring lover and brutal apparatchik. Equally chilling is Devlin's secret envy of the iron-fisted lover.
My one quibble is that Vicki Mortimer's design misses something of the play's surface normality: a brief film of windswept branches is no substitute for the specified image of a rural garden. But Anastasia Hille (who is also fine in Mountain Language) and Neil Dudgeon excellently suggest people inhabiting different worlds.
Hille moves from ironic mockery to an almost entranced hypnosis as she identifies with a victimised mother. And Dudgeon, assuming a mask of academic patronage as if dealing with a difficult pupil, is reduced to floundering irrelevance. Nothing is resolved.
But Mitchell's production leaves one with a chilling Beckettian image of Hille's transubstantiation and Pinter himself provides a master lesson in showing how the personal and the political are indivisible.
Until July 14. Box office: 020-7565 5000. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
