Torture is not a pretty sight. Harold Pinter knows that. In his 1985 play One for the Road, the torture all takes place off stage. As a result it worms its way inside your head and coils there like a silent scream. It will not go away. Long after you have left the theatre it is still gnawing away.
Bijan Sheibani, winner of this year's James Menzies-Kitchin Memorial Trust Award for Young Directors, handles the play well, but then he is particularly lucky with his actors, especially in Colin McCormack as the smooth-tongued head of police who chats away with his victims as if they were simply in a dentist's waiting room, not the headquarters of the secret state police.
Almost 20 years after it was first written, Pinter's play remains depressingly topical and almost over-familiar as if the TV news has at last caught up with it.
But there is also something almost over-theatrical and contrived about this series of cat and mouse scenarios. The showiness of the writing never lets you forget that you are watching a play, that you can choose to walk out the door if you want to.
An early critic of the piece described the experience as "having watched a piece of elegant juggling with vileness." Spot on.
Party Time, dating from 1991, comes first and makes a clever pairing for One For the Road. The world of Party Time, where a group of the privileged drink champagne and make small talk while outside the streets are in chaos, road blocks are set up and people rounded up, is merely one step back from the second play.
Safe in their own world (although safe for how long?) the privileged turn a blind eye and pretend that what is happening out on the streets isn't happening at all. The same people will also ignore the torture of One For the Road.
Party Time is a call to conscience. Unfortunately the much larger cast also brings a far greater range of performances: the good are still very good here; a couple though are barely adequate. Which just goes to prove that however good a director's ideas, it is the performances that make or break a production.
· Until Aug 17. Box office: 020 7223 2223
