Jez Butterworth made his debut with Mojo at the Royal Court in 1995 to great acclaim, and his fourth play, Parlour Game is now playing at the Almeida. Butterworth admits that Pinter has been a 'gi-normous' influence on him, and Parlour Game is enormously Pinteresque, both in substance and style. There is something vieux jeux in its Pinter content, but paradoxically this is often mitigated, almost redeemed, by the suggestiveness of its characters' speech, which, as in Pinter, weaves a telling veil over the depths of emptiness and suffering in their lives. The know-it-all braggadachio of Ned, a demolition worker (Toby Jones), is meant to conceal how horribly threatened his masculinity is, and it finally collapses like the buildings he demolishes. Cliches and catchphrases in the conversations between him and his nextdoor neighbour, Dale (Andrew Lincoln), darn over the deceit, suspicion and lack of friendship between them. Asking Dale for a lemon for her gin and tonic, Ned's disaffected wife Joy (Amanda Drew) simultaneously masks and flaunts her avid appetite for sex.
       To Ned's horror, objects keep disappearing from the house (not just little things like cufflinks, but golfclubs, a tandem bicycle, a birdbath he bought his wife on their honeymoon), but the trouble is that, unlike Pinter's, Butterworth's symbols remain obstinately salient as symbols. The disappearance motif is never literally or metaphorically integrated, and somehow protrudes like a detached bicycle spoke. Sometimes, too, the very accuracy with which the wallpapering respectability and sentimental toughness of lower middle and working-class speech patterns are respectively mimicked is almost too much of a caricature. Or bits meant to be funny were too obviously meant to be funny - Ned grunting and puffing as he executes his fitness regime, or enacting the cunnilingus exercises from an improve-your-sex-life tape, then rapidly modulating into an Eric Clapton rendition when his wife comes in. Sometimes (as with Dale and Ned performing exercises as they talk), there is too much evidence of 'business' intended to palliate longeurs of speech that nonetheless remain boring. Contrast Pinter, who integrates either metaphor or 'business' or both, in a sinisterly dramatic way, as in the Birthday Party's game of blind man's buff.
       Ultimately what was it all in aid of? Nothing much. Somehow Pinter's menacing meek men and covert vamp women manage to say something if not metaphysical, at least about the human condition. Here Ned and Dale and Joy were only saying something about their own particular situation. And the ending was unsatisfactory. Is it ingenuous and simplistic to want to know what literally happened, and to be unsatisfied at being fobbed off with what was probably metaphor, but may not have been, and at any rate seemed hopelessly ambiguous and inconclusive?
       The play was enhanced by wonderful set, lighting and sound effects slanted shadows of trees tossing and shivering across the front of the suburban house, rain bursting down in the dark as Ned uneasily looks from his lighted room. And the acting was impeccable, particularly Andrew Lincoln as Dale, who managed exactly the right inauthenticity as he told us he'd die for his (as yet unmentioned) kids, or expressed empty enthusiasm at Ned's honeymoon saga. I was baffled, though, by the casting of Amanda Drew, who, though excellent, would have been better in another (possibly Pinter) play, which in fact she seemed to have walked in out of. Among her men folk, she was incongruously educated, subtle and upper middle-class. What Ned brilliantly evoked of their honeymoon and early marriage was, even allowing for distortion by his own love and vanity, irredeemably at odds with the sort of people each appeared to be. Drew's Joy could never in a million years have bought him a tie with air-balloons on it. This was a small, maybe deliberate, inconsistency in the polished, skillful production of a skillful but dissatisfying play.
Jane O'Grady