Douglas Hodge, making his directorial debut, has had the bright idea of linking The Dumb Waiter with a number of Harold Pinter's cryptically brilliant revue sketches. But the aim of showing that they all stem from the same dark imagination is over-literally realised in Miriam Buether's oppressive set: a multi-storeyed house, full of spotlit rooms, that looks as if it had fallen off the back of a German lorry freighted with design concepts.
Two actors, Toby Jones and Jason Watkins, play all the parts and complement each other superbly. Although Jones looks like a pug-faced baby and Watkins is all lean, ferrety anxiety, they could almost be brothers. But they spend too much time in the sketches scuttling between Buether's isolated rooms. Even a masterly short such as Last to Go, in which a newspaper seller and a coffee vendor keep idly talking late at night for mortal fear of separation, doesn't quite have space to breathe.
However, the top-heavy design concept pays off handsomely in The Dumb Waiter, which, paradoxically, drives its characters underground. Here Jones and Watkins plays Gus and Ben, a pair of contract killers nervously awaiting orders in a Birmingham basement. Buether's design, with its strip-lighting and grey concrete walls, has the chilly air of an interrogation room, and the serving hatch descends with the incisive speed of a guillotine.
Jones and Watkins catch the dialogue's odd mix of Abbott and Costello and Hemingway. Jones pads around the stark cell like a nervous bear, while Watkins, from the safety of his bed, engages in a series of eye-swivelling tactical distractions. What is clear is that even in 1957 Pinter was a highly political writer, intrigued by the dynamics of power and the idea that even a pair of corporate killers are themselves victims of a higher authority. Hodge is absolutely right to see that Pinter's early works are products of a unified sensibility. Only in reminding us visually that they all take place in confined spaces does he italicise what is already apparent from the text.
· Until February 28. Box office: 01865 305305. Then touring.
