On the way into the Lyttelton a director described Harold Pinter to me as one of the "tribal elders"; and it's a mark of the respect in which he is held that the place was packed for a 40-minute performance of five of his revue sketches.
It's also a measure of Pinter's resilience that, in the week in which it was revealed he has cancer of the oesophagus, he performed a new piece with unabashed vigour. Pinter's revue sketches have never been marginal doodles. They are encapsulations of his major themes; and Press Conference, the new piece, is no exception in that, like One For the Road, it deals with the brutal suppression of dissent. Pinter comes before us as a minister of culture, and ex-head of secret police, who pays lip service to diversity and freedom but makes it clear to assembled journalists that "critical dissent is acceptable - if it is left at home." The sketch administers a short, sharp shock, and its point is one that Pinter has been making for some time: that opposition to our modern gods, whether it be the free market or the global economy, is seen as inherently subversive.
But what makes the piece so powerful is that Pinter performs it with a dangerous charm flashing smiles of complicity at the neutered hacks. He also rolls his tongue lasciviously round words like "fecundity", and at the end, quoting from St Luke, announces "he that is lost is found": a reminder of the fact that even the devil can cite scripture for his purpose. The other unfamiliar piece is Tess: an hilarious monologue in which an upper-class woman, played with impeccable precision by Penelope Wilton, recalls to a friend how "my mother became a courtesan of the highest possible calibre." But the other sketches all date from 1959 and show Pinter offering miniaturised plays in a revue-format.
Much the funniest is Trouble in the Works in which Patrick Marber's obdurate foreman achieves ascendancy over Corin Redgrave's quivering employer by his linguistic expertise in naming mechanical parts: by the end Marber is smugly behind the boss's desk having achieved a classic Pinter power-reversal.
But all these sketches are about language. In The Black and White, Susan Wooldridge and Frances de la Tour play two old derelicts keeping loneliness at bay with chat about bread, bus routes and menacing strangers. And in That's Your Trouble two young men struggle for dominance by arguing over whether strain goes down from the neck or up. It all adds up to a nice evening, showing how much Pinter can pack into an abbreviated form.
· Sketches 2 at the Lyttelton on Monday at 6pm. Box Office: 020-7452 3000
