Intimations of later Pinter abound in this intriguing adaptation of his 1950s autobiographical novel. But while the show is a goldmine for buffs, biographers and Pinterites there is no disguising the fact that Kerry Lee Crabbe's version, with its 29 scenes and shifting locations, always feels like filleted fiction rather than organic drama.
What Crabbe's version faithfully captures is Pinter's obsessive fascination with the politics of friendship. The story deals with trust and betrayal and the savage rupture of the relationship between two East End chums: a brooding rep actor, Mark, and an angst-ridden City worker, Pete.
The catalyst on the cold Hackney Downs is a teacher, Virginia, whom they both bed. But the pivotal figure in this high-strung quartet is the nerdish engaging Len, whose head is filled with strange images of animalistic predators that seem to symbolise the corruption at the heart of this fractious foursome.
Time and again one comes up against scenes that foreshadow Pinter's mature plays: best of all is a teasing, erotic encounter between Mark and Virginia, in front of a hissing gas fire, where even her revelation that "I've been going about with a man called Tucker" seems fraught with innuendo.
But Crabbe's version also exactly catches the selfconscious intellectualism of these 50s youths: their conversation is loaded with allusions to Hamlet, and when Len says, "I look into my garden and see walking blasphemies", he seems to be aping the gnomic aphorisms of the Jacobean dramatists. It makes for fascinating viewing.
But, as with all novel adaptations, there is a sense of fragmentation. And although Eileen Diss has devised an ingenious set in which a sliding screen covers the multiple shifts of locale, there is still too much fussing with chairs and tables.
You can't help feeling it would have worked even better as a film, in which you would have seen friendships fracturing against the background of Hackney Downs.
Christopher Morahan's production succeeds, however, in capturing a strong sense of period. Mark Rice-Oxley's Len has the sportsjacketed, slightly owlish anxiety of the pre-Angry Young Man generation. Daisy Haggard's Virginia exudes the crisp, contained voluptuousness of the 50s female.
And as the prime antagonists Ben Caplan's Mark boasts a wolfish, cravated dapperness and Jamie Lee's Pete the right existential neurosis. The tone and flavour of the times is precisely evoked.
The adaptation gives fascinating insights into Pinter's psyche without ever banishing your awareness that you are watching a piece of dramatised fiction.
· Until May 31. Box office: 020-7328 1000.
