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Just past the midway point of Jamie Lloyd’s epic season of Harold Pinter shorts, the Patrick Marber-directed ‘Pinter Five’ is the point that I found myself finally hitting the wall a bit. The idea of staging all of Pinter’s one-act plays over six-ish months still sounds like a great idea. But my old bones ache a bit in anticipation of another new cast, and another new set of Pinter obscurities, all of which will be gone in under a month, replaced by another cast, and another set of Pinter obscurities.
Pinter’s 1957 debut play ’The Room’, which forms the first half of ‘Pinter Five’, is a remarkably fully-formed work, a weird, violent, menacing sort-of farce about Rose Hudd, a woman living in a bedsit who experiences a series of strange and disturbing visitations. It’s not in quite the same league as ‘The Birthday Party’, ‘The Caretaker’ et al. But it’s recognisable cut from very similar cloth.
It’s hard to fathom what the hell people would have made of it 60 years ago But in 2019 Marber certainly knows his way around the thing – with a nice turn full of suppressed hysteria from Jane Horrocks as Rose, and a profoundly sinister one from Rupert Graves as her near-wordless husband Bert, it’s maybe a touch Pinter-by-numbers in light of what he did next, but would probably be viewed as a lost classic as he’d done nothing else.
Marber does such a fine job of conveying the creeping existential menace of ‘The Room’, that it’s hard to quite fathom why he throws all subtlety to the wind on 1981’s ‘Victoria Station’. Colin McFarlane gives an extremely amusing comic performance as a Caribbean-accented minicab controller who grows increasingly hysterical at his driver’s inability to comprehend where he is. But it’s not really the right performance for the play – all its creeping darkness is traded away for laughs.
The final ‘Family Voices’ is a 1980 radio play in which a runaway son (Luke Thallon) and his mother (Horrocks) correspond, but neither appears to receive each other’s letters. It’s a decent piece of writing, but static on stage, and Marber hardly finds a way to turn it into a grand flourish to cap a night that emphatically peaks in the first half.