Pinter's 1958 "comedy of menace" often comes across as a period piece, but although Simon Reade's gripping revival quite rightly keeps the 1950s setting, it succeeds in making this almost 50-year-old play seem bang up to date. It was written when a generation of Europeans had lived through the terror of waiting for the knock at the door that signalled the arrival of their own versions of Goldberg and McCann. But here, the sinister, game-playing double-act seem less like vicious Gestapo thugs, and more like the shadowy spooks of a contemporary society that carelessly sacrifices liberties on the altar of anxiety. Petey's ineffectual advice to Stanley as the latter is forcibly taken away, "Don't let them tell you what to do!" has never sounded quite so desperate or quite so necessary.
Reade's production benefits enormously from Conor Murphy's design, in which reality and artifice sit happily side by side in Meg's claustrophobic boarding-house living room, which comes complete with a natty breakfast hatch and a just-glimpsed patch of blue sky.
It is the casting that is the icing on the birthday cake here, with a clutch of beautifully nuanced performances. It is hard to know quite where to start with the praise, whether for Sheila Steafel's Meg, a woman blithely blind to many things, including her own girlish vanity, or Peter Gordon's Petey, a man who knows that he has let evil into his house but does not have a clue what to do about it. Best of all is Ferdy Roberts as Stanley, who gives the play its quiet centre of complete despair as he stares out over the horizon, apparently unseeing, but all the time staring catastrophe in the face.
· Until October 14. Box office: 0117 987 7877
