Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Second thoughts | 11 October 2018

Plus: a stylish and intelligent new play about Alzheimer’s with a swizz of an ending at the Park Theatre

Pinter Two, the second leg of the Pinter season, offers us a pair of one-act comedies. The Lover is a surreal pastiche of married life. A suburban housewife has a paramour who visits her daily while her husband is at work. The husband knows of his rival and discusses his wife’s infidelity as if it were a normal aspect of marriage. He toddles off to the office and a little later the lover arrives: it’s the husband. They begin a game of role play. The wife is a whore and the husband is her trick. This neat device dramatises the theory that marriage is prostitution in disguise.

Director Jamie Lloyd presents the show as a paranormal absurdity. Garish pink dominates the couple’s weird, rectilinear home. Pink walls, pink doors, pink shelves, pink everything. The husband and wife speak in clipped uber-posh accents like two robots programmed to imitate stupid toffs. It’s funny enough for a while but Pinter can’t develop the script beyond its opening premise and the cartoonish performances by John Macmillan and Hayley Squires start at maximum volume and have nowhere else to go. A TV version from 1963 (available on YouTube) places the characters in an ordinary house and lets them speak in sober, matter-of-fact tones. This is more disturbing and, in the end, funnier than Jamie Lloyd’s sketch-show production. And because the film stars Vivien Merchant (the first Mrs P.) it probably comes closer to Pinter’s intentions than this frivolous and crudely amusing update.

The Collection is about a gay couple, one elderly, one youthful, whose relationship is threatened by a jealous husband who believes the younger man has been dallying with his wife. The stagecraft is botched — a rarity for Pinter — and the designer has to incorporate two separate households into a single set.

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