Harold Pinter's first play was inspired by his own experiences as a touring actor, when he regularly stayed in dingy digs. In Erica Whyman's production, it is also very much a play of the theatre, a reflection of life and art caught as if in a distorting hall of mirrors in an end-of-pier show.
Soutra Gilmour's clever design transforms the Crucible into a theatre in the round, but leaves the audience facing two silent figures in an otherwise empty block of seats. Plastic seagulls hover over the stage. The kitchen/diner of the seaside boarding house is clearly just an unconvincing stage set, of the kind used by touring companies back in the 1950s. The lighting is free-standing and old-fashioned.
The moment that sends a shiver down your spine comes when the two figures walk down the aisle on to the stage, then stare at the audience as if seeking someone out. Goldberg and his sidekick McCann have arrived centre stage, and, of course, it is Stanley whom they are seeking. Stanley is the lodger of Petey and his flighty, childlike wife Meg, played beautifully here by Anna Calder-Marshall as an embryonic, more innocent Kath from Entertaining Mr Sloane. At the end Goldberg and McCann lead Stanley out of the theatre. He has the dazed look of a man who has spent too long in the dark.
The play-within-the-play device is a nifty one, exaggerating The Birthday Party's Kafkaesque qualities - Stanley may have something to hide, the suave Goldberg and threatening McCann may be his nemeses or merely a passing accident - and the way the division between fantasy and reality are blurred. At its best, this is as dislocating an experience for the audience as it is for Stanley himself, who loses his glasses, his voice and maybe his mind, and who is possibly about to lose his life.
Whyman's production has every gear in place but never quite manages to crank up enough tension, particularly in the second-act party, with its disorienting game of blind man's bluff. But the acting is always special, particularly from John Lloyd Fillingham as a stocky Stanley and Robert East as Goldberg, a thug in a sharp suit.
·Until March 2. Box office: 0114-249 6000. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
