Harold Pinter the writer is much lauded. Less is written about Pinter the actor. Watching him play the sadistic interrogator in his own short, shocking play about political oppression, you realise he could have been a contender: mixing muscular authority with flickering irony, he would have made a natural classical heavy. A pity, you feel, he never gave his Richard III.
That quality of lethal surprise is very necessary in One for the Road. In four brisk scenes we see Nicolas, a high-ranking state official, confronting three imprisoned members of a single family: the silent, ultimately mutilated Victor, his raped wife Gila and their vulnerable son.
The play has an incremental horror. But it needs shade and colour in the playing of Nicolas if it is not to seem a straightforward condemnation of state brutalism.
In Robin Lefevre's production from the Gate Theatre Dublin, Pinter gives it remarkable variety of texture. In a long, silent prelude we see Nicolas psyching himself up for the ensuing ritual. With each of his victims he then assumes a mask of playfulness that gradually splits to reveal the moral cruelty beneath.
Pinter flashes his dentist's smile at Victor and rolls the word "insouciant" round his tongue as if it were a fine wine. To Victor's son he is dangerously avuncular and to his wife curiously sexual. But each time Pinter's bonhomie snaps to reveal that this is a game being played to a deadly conclusion.
Pinter's acting highlights the duality of linen-suited commissars like Nicolas. They may be vain, insecure and even, in a curious way, avid for validation from their victims. But deep down they are driven by implacable conviction.
When Pinter talks of the "common heritage" from which Victor is excluded, he instinctively bunches his left fist. And when he describes Gila's late father as "iron and gold", it is in tones of awestruck admiration. In his actions, Nicolas is clearly evil; the paradox is that he believes he is keeping the world clean for God.
Pinter and Lefevre bring out this paradox to the full. Liz Ascroft's set also implies that behind this banal state office lurks another shadowy world. And Lloyd Hutchinson as Victor, Indira Varma as Gila and Rory Copus as their son highlight the strangest paradox of all: that this tortured family has some secret quality not even their oppressor can understand.
It would have been good to see the play teamed with A Kind of Alaska, with which it will shortly appear in New York. But it offers an unforgettable image of tyranny and shows Pinter has that quality of danger that defines all the best actors.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7369 1761. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
