Harold Pinter's early plays are enjoying renewed interest with a fine production of The Birthday Party in Bristol and revivals of The Caretaker taking place both at Sheffield and nearby Nottingham. At the Crucible, rookie main house director Jamie Lloyd proves his mettle with a production that seems grounded in the everyday and is yet also edged with weirdness.
It has a touch of the hallucinatory, as if you can see the physical reality of the characters, but also get a sense of their internal emotional plumbing. The production gurgles, drips and seeps not so much with menace as with the sad leak of human dampness.
The Sheffield stage is a large one, but Soutra Gilmour's design goes a long way to creating an enclosed world, even if Ashton's junk piles look unusually tidy. Beyond the sackcloth-covered window you hear the constant roar of traffic and people whose lives are going somewhere, perhaps even to Sidcup - where Davies, the tramp Ashton invites into the half-derelict house, constantly claims to be bound but never goes.
Although the trio come and go, it is as if they are locked inside this prison of their own making, a place of power plays where everyone is jostling for position and looking to make alliances with the strongest person.
Lloyd has got the casting spot-on. There are three superb performances: David Bradley as the belligerent Davies; Con O'Neil, his voice like a flute, as the wreck of a man that is Ashton; and Nigel Harman, who plays Mick as a quiet, stocky bully - a man who knows both the extent of his own power and its limitations.
· Until November 11. Box office: 0114-249 6000.
