Revived 45 years after these two one-acters were written for television, Jamie Lloyd directs two of Harold Pinter’s early plays, fittingly coupled together to explore the themes of unconventional sexual practices, fantasy, love triangles and the ensuing struggles for dominance within relationships.
The central twist of The Lover’s marital comedy of manners is that the husband is also his wife’s afternoon lover; their relationship includes a fantastical third member, a scenario which also serves as a possible interpretation of The Collection. This fetishistic game at first sustains the excitement of their marriage but by the play’s close brings the husbands to the brink of meltdown as he struggles to reconcile fantasy and reality. Unfortunately, although Richard Coyle and Gina McKee are instantly recognisable from many a British drama, a sure-fire crowd puller, their lack of onstage credibility makes their rendering of the husband and wife and their role-playing counterparts equally unconvincing, warping the important distinction between the reality of their hum-drum marriage and the fantasy that they choose to escape to.
However, the chemistry between the two lovers is well sustained, culminating in an impressive final scene as McKee impressively portrays the wife’s ultimate resilience in the face of her husband’s breakdown. Thankfully, the interval introduces Charlie Cox’s West end debut and theatre-veteran Timothy West as The Collection’s gay couple; a relationship invaded by James (Coyle) with accusations that bisexual Bill has slept with his wife (McKee). Cox perfectly articulates the witty banter characteristic of Pinter’s dialogue, as he toys with the sexually insecure James, and the production is worth seeing if only for West’s brilliant rendering of Pinter’s famous “slum slug…slug mind” monologue. However, this rather cautious production plays down the sexual tension within the gay love triangle, sidelining the themes of sexual insecurity and ownership which are really at the heart of the play. The Collection was written without concession to orthodoxy and it seems only right that this should be reflected in these liberalised times almost half a century later.
Although both plays were originally written for television, The Collection is a particularly ambitious play to stage on account of its duel-household setting and fast pace of scene changes. The necessity of combining two distinct living rooms, in addition to the menacing phone box, on the Comedy Theatre’s relatively small stage makes for a confused set. However, this technical fault is partly compensated for by the resulting presence of McKee in the background of many of the male-dominated scenes, her ghost-like dominance of the stage throughout the play effectively conveying her superiority in keeping her head whilst all the men around her lose theirs. In contrast, The Lover’s clean-cut 60s set is perfectly reminiscent of the era when Pinter shocked audiences by not only dramatising domestic sexuality but by televising it. Further, The Lover’s set is fittingly claustrophobic for a play centered around the intimacies of marriage, whereas The Collection’s set is merely cluttered. In particular, the former’s horizontally-split stage into a clearly-defined bedroom and living-room successfully represents the territories assigned to the wife as she plays the parts of her husband’s spouse and her husband’s mistress.
Despite the faults of these performances, Pinter’s skill in crafting perfectly formed one-act sketches is well expressed. The theme of struggles for sexual dominance and the roles that fantasy and mystery play is central to these plays and they therefore provide an important basis for exploring his later, better-known plays such as The Homecoming and Betrayal. However, as these stage productions show, the plays are best left to the context of television for which they were originally intended.
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