Recently some ancient Harold Pinter sketches were exhumed at the Haymarket Theatre Royal but failed to come back to life. This resurrection of a double bill of TV plays from the ’60s is far more sparky with an alluring combination of sinister sex and comic menace. Both pieces show how men fail to cope with even the possibility of betrayal, while ‘The Lover’ leans heavily on their perception of women as either Madonnas or whores. Gina McKee’s Sarah waves her city gent husband off to work. She puts away the duster, slips out of a floral frock and into a slinky leather dress, before welcoming that same husband back in the afternoon in the guise of Max, her bit of rough on the side. While Sarah enjoys their spicy love life, it’s Richard who struggles to cope and threatens to trample all over their fantasy. There’s even the suggestion in Jamie Lloyd’s peppy production that without the structure of the S&M fantasy, Richard’s violence could well get out of hand.
Lloyd and his designer Soutra Gilmour cunningly merge two ’60s sitting rooms on stage in ‘The Connection’ in which a woman tells her husband James, about a one-night stand in Leeds and he sets out to track down the man. Who is telling the truth? Is it Stella (McKee again) whose description of the event comes close to rape? Or is it Charlie Cox’s insolent Bill who finds it hard to fix on a single story at all? James visits Bill and becomes increasingly drawn to him, to the annoyance of Timothy West’s waspish gay Harry. West hits Pinter’s rhythms right on the beat as he dismisses Bill as a slum boy. In both these pieces, the women are hardly more than the catalysts for an examination of male failings, but anyone in search of a Pinter primer would do well to try this lively double bill.
