Pinter at the Pinter

Jamie Lloyd has an ambitious undertaking at the Harold Pinter Theatre. He is putting on a six month season of Pinter’s one act plays. On Saturday afternoon I was taken to two of them: The Lover (1961) and The Collection (1962).

It was an excuse to brush up my Pinter. I was unaware he wrote such a prodigious number of plays or that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 to go alongside his CH and CBE. Every performance of a piece of music or a play is different and Pinter’s plays especially lend themselves to re-interpretation. Originally his work was performed with long pauses that turned into menacing silences. The plays I saw on Saturday afternoon have all the ambiguity that is another Pinter hallmark but they were pacy and, maybe, funnier than the author intended. Two of the four members of the cast may be known to you: David (Poirot) Suchet and Russell (History Boy) Tovey and there’s no doubt they are good box office bait. There’s more good box office casting throughout the season.

Here is the full programme:

• The Lover and The Collection (27 September 2018 – 20 October 2018)
• One of the Road, The New World Order, Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes (28 September 2018 – 20 October 2018)
• Landscape and A Kind of Alaska (15 November 2018 – 8 December 2018)
• Moonlight and Night School (16 November 2018 – 8 December 2018)
• The Room, Family Voices and Victoria Station (3 January 2019 – 26 January 2019)
• Party Time and Celebration (4 January 2019 – 26 January 2019)
• A Slight Ache and The Dumb Waiter (7 February 2019 – 23 February 2019

I went to the premier of Moonlight at the Almeida in 1993. I remember the occasion but not the play. We spent too long in the bar beforehand; one of our party was a racing journalist – a profession not known for sobriety. Our seats were good – too good in my opinion as I had Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter immediately in front of me. My hostess had to keep prodding me to suppress my snores. Afterwards we went to an excellent pizza restaurant in a converted Citroën garage round the corner.

If you hadn’t heard of the Harold Pinter Theatre it was called the Comedy until 2011 and is a small Victorian theatre off Haymarket. The last thing I saw there was a Pinteresque play. Nice Fish, that I mentioned inter alia here, in January 2017.