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Grief and groans

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 6th February 2008

Purgatorio
Arcola

Happy Now?
Cottesloe

The Lover/The Collection
Comedy

Harold Pinter’s The Lover is a short antique work which feels bang up-to-date. A husband and wife both have extra-marital affairs but their ‘liaisons’ involve only themselves in disguise. Thin idea, almost a sketch, but Pinter has transformed this slice of absurdism into an intense and brilliantly realised dramatic world which delivers a fascinating critique of sexual relationships. They’re all pretence. Each partner dramatises a notional version of themselves which complements the role invented by their mate. Married life is theatre. Gina McKee works wonders with the limited role of the wife, and rather than play her like a zombified sex-slave she exudes a knowing lusty haughtiness which is eerie and very funny. Opposite her, Richard Coyle’s confused and snaky eroticism is fascinatingly ambivalent. The second half of the double bill, The Collection, centres on an unreliable allegation of sexual betrayal. Looser and less structurally satisfying than The Lover, this might have been an anticlimax but for Timothy West’s hilarious performance as a louche old queen presiding over a gay ménage. These aren’t easy or inviting works and it’s their very weirdness that makes them interesting. Pinter talks of his inspiration as ‘an insistence in my mind’ that drives him to write. That may sound pretentious but it makes sense if you see these two plays. They have precisely the quality Eliot ascribed to Blake, ‘the unpleasantness of great poetry’.

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