#pinter five

We’ve reached the fifth instalment of Jamie Lloyd’s season of Pinter’s one-act plays, but only now do we arrive at The Room, Pinter’s first play, written in 1957.

It’s an opportunity to see him carving out his identity as a writer. Many of the tropes that would come to define him are already in evidence – the claustrophobia of the rooming house, a keen ear for speech patterns, narrative ambiguity, a pervading sense of menace and unease – but he’s still honing his craft. It foreshadows The Birthday Party in more ways than one.

Jane Horrocks and Rupert Graves play Mr and Mrs Hudd, a married couple living in cramped lodgings. She talks up a storm, while he never says a word. The world outside their room, the house itself even, is made to seem ominous and threatening. A series of visitors pierce this domestic set-up. Nicholas Woodeson as their loquacious landlord, Emma Naomi and Luke Thallon as a young couple who say they are interested in taking a room in the house, but seem more intent on intimidating Mrs Hudd, and Colin MacFarlane as a mysterious blind man.

Horrocks anchors the piece, radiating fear even when chattering away about tea and bacon. Patrick Marber’s direction brings out the simmering undercurrent of violence. The last few minutes are almost unbearably tense, as Graves, silent throughout, nears the point of explosion.

Throughout the season, the plays have been grouped intelligently, echoing each other in interesting ways, and that’s also true here.

The Room and another longer piece – Family Voices – are sandwiched around Victoria Station, a two-hander written in 1982. It takes the form of a dialogue between a taxi dispatcher and one of his drivers. While it could no doubt be played straight, Marber plays it broadly for laughs. MacFarlarne revels in the role of the increasingly exasperated dispatcher as he deals with a man who does not know where he is – neither geographically nor spiritually, it seems. MacFarlane is great, as is Graves as the driver, but the insistence on the piece being played for comedy makes it feel tonally out of step with the other two plays.

The triple bill concludes with Family Voices, a radio play  first broadcast in 1981. Luke Thallon plays a young man who has fled his home for an unknown reason and ended up at yet another sinister rooming house, inhabited by members of the same, strange family. The play takes the form of a series of letters between Thallon and Horrocks as the mother searching for her son and Graves as the young man’s possibly deceased father.

Its origins as a play written for radio are evident and it operates here principally as a showcase for Thallon to do a series of voices and characters. He’s very good at this, but there’s an inevitably static quality to the piece that the quality of the performances can’t override.

As a whole, this is the least satisfying instalment of the Pinter project to date, despite the fascinating opportunity it provides to see the shaping of a young playwright.