Memory is a construct in this double bill of Pinter shorts, two plays that are like sharp shards of reflecting glass.
In the 20-minute Monologue, a dapper, ageing man (the excellent Clive Mendus) sits drinking a glass of wine and talking to somebody who is apparently sitting in the chair next to him. Who is this invisible person to whom he chats with a jaunty casualness, detailing a shared past and a shared woman? Is this one-sided conversation endlessly repeated, and does it take the same form every night? The stage is set up in a mirror image: is he simply talking to his younger self? A former best friend? Towards the end of the play, it seems as if it might be his brother. In Chris Goode's scrupulous production, the lone man casts two shadows on the opposing walls. It is simple science, of course, but nonetheless it feels spooky.
A shadow, explains Beth in the two-hander Landscape, occurs when direct light is obstructed. Beth (Maggie Henderson) is a painter, and in Monologue she paints the picture of a day on the beach with a man. The man may or may not be Duff (George Irving), who sits at the other end of a long kitchen table. (I'd like to think he is.) As in Monologue, there are ghost children – the unconceived, except in the mind. Beth talks of tenderness and rapture, he talks of beer and violence. She talks of love, he of infidelity. They appear to be in the same life, yet not even in the same room: the long table has a clumsy join. They are separated: not just physically and emotionally, but by memory itself, as if memory is a series of rooms where we lock ourselves away.
