These two one-acters, originally written for television, remind us that Harold Pinter, for all his touted menace, has always had a sharply comic eye and ear for English middle-class oddities.
The Lover, in particular, is a near-flawless structure that shows that most marriages need a strong element of sexual fantasy. It starts with a conventional husband casually asking his wife, as he sets off to work: "Is your lover coming today?" The essential joke is that the husband himself is the afternoon lover, and that he and his wife indulge in role-playing sex games. Under the comic surface, however, Pinter makes a serious social point about female durability. In Jamie Lloyd's production, Gina McKee dazzlingly shifts from loyal wife to sexy predator sliding lasciviously across the floor on all fours. Richard Coyle, as the harassed hubby, could do more to suggest incipient breakdown, but the play tells the candid truth about middle-class marriage.
Admittedly, The Collection, with its cluttered design, betrays its TV origins. But Lloyd's production gets the essential point across: what matters is not whether the married Stella slept with Bill, the junior partner in a gay couple, but the way her husband, James, is ineluctably drawn to the bisexual Bill. There are strong intimations of The Servant as Richard Coyle's ambivalent James plays weird games with Charlie Cox's Bill, and at one point suggestively straddles him. If The Lover is about marital fantasies, this is a play about sexual insecurity.
But there is a lot of comedy here, well brought out by Timothy West as Bill's elderly lover. He may not possess the saturnine ferocity Pinter himself brought to the role, but West marvellously suggests an ageing pussycat with sharp claws and a strong sense of sexual ownership.
· Until May 3. Box office: 0870 060 6637. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
