How do theatres get their names? Pinter at the Pinter makes a strong case for them waving the banner of a dramatist. Jamie Lloyd has put together a season of Harold Pinter’s short plays. The first two batches feature plays from the 1950s with domestic settings (entitled Pinter Two), alongside more recent, overtly violent, clearly political episodes (Pinter One). Seeing them in one day is to visit a country at once foreign and shockingly familiar. Taken together, they show how Pinter, who died 10 years ago, rewired theatre.
He dismantles the traditional theatrical subject of social class not by scowling at it but by collapsing its language: thugs have a rarefied vocab; toffs talk tough. He disrupts action with a shimmer of the unconscious, so that subtext becomes the main point. And time and again he foreshadows today’s galvanising preoccupation: bullying. Sexual abuse, psychological coercion, gaslighting, torture: the varieties are infinite and on a continuum.
Pinter Two’s brace of dramas shows Lloyd’s direction at its most over-emphatic and its most successful. In Soutra Gilmour’s cheerily ironic raspberry explosion of a design, The Lover is directed as if it were farce – clipped voices, arch delivery, speedy action: the tension drains out of a play that should be sinister as well as teasing. Yet The Collection – with its free-floating sexual accusations – is exquisitely insinuating. John Macmillan and Hayley Squires are full of subtle disruptions. David Suchet is feline and fastidious (matching socks and braces). Heavy-limbed, Russell Tovey looks as if he can’t be arsed to act – an ideal performance mode for Pinter.
The plays that make up Pinter One are so ferocious that they are often hard to watch. The most obviously prescient is a striking squib – discovered by Antonia Fraser nine years after her husband’s death – starring a president (big hair and tiny fingerwork) who orders the nuking of London because he thinks the city is the capital of France. The fiercest has Antony Sher as a fastidiously thin-lipped torturer. The most far-reaching is Lia Williams’s production of Ashes to Ashes: in which a woman’s memories of being threatened – nearly throttled – by her man are shadowed by Holocaust horrors. That link could look like a cheap shot. But Kate O’Flynn and Paapa Essiedu ensure it is a terrible truth, looking out baldly towards the audience as if they think it is a duty to dob themselves in.
Might this start a trend for seasons? I would welcome that. And a rethinking of what we honour when we name theatres. What about a few more artists and women alongside the owners and investors? Why not a Caryl Churchill theatre? After all, London has two Lyrics – only a few notes away from a Caryl.
Wilton’s Music Hall (named after a proprietor) is an ingeniously chosen setting for James Graham’s Sketching: the right area (east London) and period (Victorian) for a show inspired by Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, quick scenes from metropolitan life. There is also ingenuity, and generosity in the writing process. Graham and director Thomas Hescott collaborated with eight dramatists at the beginning of their careers.
Ellan Parry’s fluidly scrawled design is vivacious. A cast of five work hard in multiple parts; a romance plot twists nicely into darkness. But the weird density of Dickens’s descriptions is missing. Characters caper “Dickensianly”. Twenty-first-century preoccupations – the internet, conceptual art – dutifully loom. There is, though, no faulting the fatberg as metaphor: Dickens would surely have loved it. Which reminds me: what has happened to Fatberg: the Musical? And makes me wonder whether Sketching should not have been a Wilton’s variety show.
Star ratings (out of five)
Pinter at the Pinter ★★★★
Sketching ★★
Pinter at the Pinter runs until 23 February; Sketching runs until 27 October
