Originally written for TV in 1973, this 30-minute Pinter piece gets a rare outing as a Cottesloe Platform performance. It is fussily directed by Gari Jones, but beautifully played by Henry Woolf, and offers a classic exploration of Pinter themes in compact, miniaturised form.
Memories, real or imagined, are always a clue to Pinter, and here come tumbling forth. A character, called simply Man, sits alone addressing an absent friend in an empty chair. As he talks, you get a sense of his former closeness to his unseen chum: an Edenic state of masculine intimacy abruptly shattered, as so often in Pinter, by a disruptive female presence (a beautiful black girl drove a wedge between the two friends). But the more the speaker insists that he is free of the past, the more you sense that he is enslaved by his multi-layered, idealised memories.
The play's vitality comes from its language: Pinter's poetic contrast between the confined situation and the speaker's linguistic eccentricity. And this is something that Woolf is peculiarly adept at suggesting. Pouring a beer for his imagined friend, he is spry and bouncy rather than depressive. Searching for the words "jack-in-the-box", he makes spiralling motions with his hands, as if the actions will somehow prompt the right phrase.
Through his acting, Woolf clearly articulates Pinter's theme: the self-delusions of age, the immersion in mythic recollections of paradise lost. But it's all there in the language, and so it is redundant for the speaker to play an all-too-convenient tape of These Foolish Things. Jones also has Woolf roaming needlessly around the stage - what we are watching is an imagined conversation in which one partner just happens to be absent. I yearned for something more focused, but this remains an essential collector's item, reminding us how in Pinter the past is always a means of sustaining us in the imperfect present.
· Until January 24. Box office: 020-7452 3000. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
