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Jamie Lloyd can direct the hell out of a Harold Pinter play, and as his Pinter at the Pinter season heads towards the home stretch, the swaggering pizzazz of ‘Pinter Six’ is a real shot of adrenaline.
Consisting of just two pieces – 1991’s ‘Party Time’ and 2000’s ‘Celebration’ – ‘Pinter Six’ has a cast to die for, a neat aesthetic conceit uniting both halves (everyone is black-clad and brunette in the first half, blingy and blonde in the second), and is wrapped up in just 90 minutes, including an interval: something of a theatrical holy grail.
Neither play is regarded as being top tier Pinter, but Lloyd certainly makes a real case for ‘Party Time’. It’s set at a swanky soiree, at which John Simm’s obsequious Terry is trying to sell Phil Davis’s prim official Gavin on the merits of his fancy members’ club. But other things are trying to intrude: Terry’s wife, Dusty (Eleanor Matsuura), keeps asking as to the whereabouts of her brother, Jimmy, despite Terry’s venomous attempts to get her to shut up. And there are allusions to violence and protests on the roads. Meanwhile, the double doors at the heart of Soutra Gilmour’s set are sporadically hammered upon, a dazzling light shining between the cracks. It is a funny, unnerving evocation of the bubble of extreme privilege at the top of a dictatorship, and in Lloyd’s hands feels like one of Pinter’s more successful political works.
My understanding of Pinter’s final ‘proper’ play ‘Celebration’ is that its vulgar protagonists – scoffing at a fancy restaurant after a night of culture they failed to understand and can barely remember, intellectually outclassed by the staff – were written as a satire on the affectations of New Labour-embracing Islington types. But Lloyd’s production makes them into full on old school East Enders. Sure, Pinter was himself a working-class Hackney boy done good. But Lloyd is in danger of making the play feel a little sneery. That doesn’t really seem like his style, but it is how it comes across.
That accepted, it’s funny and well directed, a wilfully crass negative to the rumbling menace of ‘Party Time’, with the raucous boozing broken up by the interjections of the staff, most notably Abraham Popoola’s waiter, who butts in to inform the bemused carousers of his grandfather’s friendship with various titans of the literary world.
If the politics of Lloyd’s revival feel a touch problematic, it still goes down pretty smooth in ‘Pinter Six’s roar of satirical light and heat.