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The only ‘full-length’ play (it’s just over an hour) that Harold Pinter composed in the final three decades of his life, 1993’s ‘Moonlight’ is kind of the most minor of his major works, a meditation on death that feels more laboured than his true classics but emphatically has Something Going For It.
The main innovation in director Lyndsey Turner’s revival is to ditch the multiple locations stipulated by the text and stage the entire thing in the bedroom of dying man Andy (Robert Glenister) – with the implication that much of this is taking place in his head. It more or less makes sense, and allows Glenister to turn in a sparky and robust performance at odds with Andy’s alleged physical state, which makes his savage sparring with his unflappable wife Bel (Brid Brennan) pretty enjoyable.
I’m not massively convinced by the skit-like scenes featuring his sons Jake and Fred (Al Weaver and Dwane Walcott), who appear to have taken refuge in an endless series of elaborate invented scenarios. They initially seem like a joke and eventually appear more like a serious disorder, but they mostly feel like a silly tangent.
But if it’s a bit of a curate’s egg, ‘Moonlight’ picks up steam: there are some absolutely ravishing speeches on the nature of death; there’s a brilliantly menacing cameo from Janie Dee as Andy (and Bel’s!) ex-lover Maria; and the final monologue from Andy’s daughter Bridget (Isis Hainsworth), who is presumably deceased, is searingly beautiful. I think it’s probably still waiting for a director to really unlock its mysteries, but Turner gives it a thoughtful shot that makes a case for the play.
You could probably say the exact opposite about ‘Night School’, which is paired with ‘Moonlight’ to form the fourth programme in Jamie Lloyd’s epic Pinter at the Pinter season. A 1960 TV play, it is fairly obviously not a great work, but it feels like this self-evident truth has liberated rising-star director Ed Stambollouian, allowing him to give it the sort of irreverent, punky treatment we rarely get with Pinter. A comedy about a man, Walter (Weaver again), who leaves jail and returns home only to find his room has been given away to a woman who may not be all she appears, it’s reasonably Pinteresque but probably closer to one of Orton’s farces, sprinkled with a little Monty Python. Stambollouian’s main innovation is to shove a live drummer into the middle of it. Abbie Finn’s clattering fills give it an agreeably manic energy that also occasionally mockingly underscores the none-more-‘60s action.
‘Pinter Four’ is lacking an outright masterpiece, but both halves definitely have something, not least the piquancy of staging two such different works together. Not essential, but I wouldn’t want to have missed it.