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Show: Pinter 7
Society: London (professional shows)
Venue: Harold Pinter Theatre, London
Credits: Harold Pinter. Produced by The Jamie Lloyd Company, ATG Productions, Ben Lowy Productions, Gavin Kalin Productions and Glass Half Full Productions
Type: Sardines
Author: John Chapman
Performance Date: 31/01/2019
Pinter Seven
John Chapman | 12 Feb 2019 20:18pm
Photo: Mark Brenner
Jamie Lloyd’s marathon Pinter at the Pinter season has reached the home straight with a pairing of two of the writer’s earliest plays A Slight Ache and The Dumb Waiter. As ever the casting and staging are impeccable and these perfectly formed short pieces pack an emotional wallop which far exceeds their brevity. They are both tellingly funny yet distressingly harrowing and neatly summarise so many of the themes present in the other works performed throughout the last six months.
A Slight Ache is definitely the more “difficult” of the pairing. It started life as a radio play and indeed a recording studio setting makes the piece’s lineage abundantly clear. An unnamed actor and actress are seated in front of microphones and reading the lines of a bourgeois couple Edward and Flora. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the recording studio is at odds with the scene being evoked in the radio play. We learn that they are breakfasting in their sunny garden on the longest day of the year and it is evident that their mundane small talk and clipped accents are meant to parody the likes of Coward or Rattigan – the establishment playwrights against whom the late 50’s so-called angry young men were reacting. This ostensibly domestic idyll is invaded by a wasp which gets into the marmalade and is somewhat sadistically killed. From this point on darker tones begin to dominate and we gradually realise the couple’s dissatisfaction with their lives and each other. Their peace is further shattered by a sinister silent match seller whom Edward insists on inviting into the house. We wonder if he is to suffer the same fate as the wasp but instead his presence fully exposes the couple’s insecurities and as they project their fears and desires onto him what starts as a slight ache in Edward’s eye becomes full blown paranoia and, perhaps, insanity.
John Heffernan and Gemma Whelan are on top form in this piece. Their middle class respectability is quickly eroded and exposes their characters for the hollow shams that they are. Flora’s sexual frustration is made manifest by her apparently simple references to the abundant vegetation in her garden while Edward’s social and political inadequacies result in him delivering a lengthy monologue first with false bonhomie and ultimately with him a whispering wreck on the floor. Pinter gives the man the rather more overtly dramatic arc and Heffernan seizes the moment with alacrity. His outward attempts to offer the match seller hospitality (has a drinks list ever sounded more hilarious?) are undercut by his nervy body language. Tellingly the character wears a belt AND braces – clearly he is someone who likes to minimise risk. Whelan proves to be a dab hand with some of the Foley techniques (live sound effects) used in radio recordings. The focus of the couple’s projections, the match seller is all the more sinister for not being seen/heard until… but that would be to spoil the ending.
Matches are a motif which also crops up in the second play of the evening. One of Pinter’s most celebrated pieces, The Dumb Waiter concerns a couple of hitmen killing time while awaiting instructions in a dank Birmingham basement. It opens with one of the writer’s infamous pauses… perhaps lasting three minutes or more during which Ben (the senior partner) stoically reads a newspaper and Gus (his accomplice) fiddles with his shoes, paces nervously and repeatedly tries to flush the offstage toilet. They find an envelope with twelve matches in it – the sinister resonances from the first play are instantly foregrounded though, strangely this element is then left hanging.
Ben and Gus are a classic comedy cross-talking double act. They are also reminiscent of the bickering tramps in Godot or John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction – I’d be intrigued to know whether Tarantino took this piece as an influence. However, instead of protracted discussions about hamburgers, here the talk is of quintessentially British cups of tea and a stale Eccles cake. Martin Freeman and Danny Dyer as the hitmen are nothing short of superb and form a totally winning combination with spot on timing. Freeman is all nervous tics and relentless questioning; Dyer is apparently more laid back but as the play progresses he shows us other dimensions to the character vainly trying to assert his negligible authority and nervously fluttering his fingers (Oliver Hardy?). The more exasperated the pair become, the funnier the situation grows, especially when the dumb waiter itself gets in on the action. Rather like the bee and the match seller in the first play, this small service lift invades the protagonists’ space and causes somewhat of a crisis. The written demands for food coming from above become increasingly exotic and an attempt to “appease the Gods” with Gus’s meagre picnic are firmly rebuffed. The dumb waiter, or rather whoever is operating it, controls the fate of both men. As it repeatedly crashes downwards in noisy guillotine- like fashion it effectively causes a crisis in the hitmen’s relationship and simmering antagonism between the pair boils over into a terrifying climax. As they prepare to carry out the job for which they were hired …. But, again, to reveal this would spoil the ending.
I have admired Soutra Gilmour’s season design throughout and once again she does not disappoint. Both the radio studio and basement room are very well realised and the monochromatic scheme used in the second play (emphasised by her costume design and the moody lighting of Jon Clark) helps to reinforce the late 1950s setting. There is also a very claustrophobic feel to the production; hell really can be the people closest to us. Jamie Lloyd himself directs with an assurance that demonstrates his command of Pinter’s body of work. If I was left somewhat puzzled and frustrated by A Slight Ache that may be because the second play was so keenly anticipated. I was not disappointed and The Dumb Waiter ends this masterful season on an absolute high.
Photo: Mark Brenner
- : admin
- : 31/01/2019