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Director
Jamie Lloyd
Designer
Soutra Gilmour
Lighting
Designer
Jon Clark
'The Lover'
Richard
Richard Coyle
Sarah
Gina McKee
John
Charlie Cox
'The Collection'
Harry
Timothy West
James
Richard Coyle
Stella
Gina McKee
Bill
Charlie Cox
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Comedy Theatre
13 - 27 February 2008 |
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'What
are you doing - playing a
game?' demands Sarah in the
Lover. 'A game? I don't play
games', answers her husband
- then goes on to claim that
it is because of 'the children'
that this will be his 'last
game'. They don't have any
children, of course: he is
just embarking on a new game.
Games are the chief preoccupation
of both these Pinter plays
- games the characters play,
and games the actors who play
them play with the audience.
As with Shakespeare's comedies,
where so often a boy acts
the girl (Rosalind, Viola,
etc) who acts the boy (Ganymede,
Cesario, etc), so with Pinter's
The
Lover,
Richard Coyle and Gina McKee
act the husband and wife,
who act lover and mistress.
Richard kisses his wife's
cheek as he leaves with his
brief-case in the morning,
asking matter-of-factly if
her lover is coming this afternoon.
As the play progresses, we
see that this, like so much
of the dialogue, is actually
part of a code. It is a code
private to them, but a code
they both know and don't know
- it requires continual decoding.
Each follows the clues the
other sets in the sexual fantasy,
and the audience is forced
to follow clues too - trying
to work out what the situation
really is, what is actually
going on under the characters'
game-playing. Except that,
in a way, the situation is
nothing but the game, nothing
'is' going on 'other' than
game-playing - the couple
are creating their own canopy
over nothing. The life of
the marriage is precisely
the role-playing they go in
for in order that they can
be constrained by marriage
yet free within it, in order
to domesticate infidelity.
Similarly in the Collector,
in which Stella, the wife
(also played by Gina McKee)
may or may not have slept
with Bill (Charlie Cox), a
young clothes designer, during
a business trip to Leeds.
Her husband James (Richard
Coyle) rings, and finally
doorsteps, Bill to interrogate
him. He seems to want to play
the role of jealous, cuckolded
spouse so as to give his relationship
more piquancy, and, equally,
the older man (a sad, seedy
Timothy West) who 'shares
a house with' Bill is going
to insist on 'his'version
of the truth - that no extra-marital
sex occurred. In the end,
it hardly seems to matter
what actually happened. Role-playing
is an end in itself - a response
to, and cure for, lacklustre
domesticity. If it is through
enacting fantasies that the
characters in these marriages
and relationships are temporally
liberated from ordinariness
and able to experience the
forbidden, then the fantasy
can sometimes embrace real,
as well as simulated, adultery.
Here, directed by Jamie Lloyd,
the acting is uniformly deft
and slick, but, since the
protagonists are written as
reflecting mirrors, we cannot
read their feelings or thoughts,
which makes their tortuous
manouevres unmoving. Shakespeare's
Rosalind and Viola each have
an existence before they take
up their boy-roles, and, with
asides and monologues, during
them. Whereas Pinter's Richard,
Sarah, James, Bill, Stella
(if less so Harry) are only
what they show to one another,
the roles of aggression and
submission each adopts as
they alternate power and surrender.
The actors brilliantly capture,
though, what Pinter seems
to intend - the strange mixture
of staginess and improvisation
in sexual role-playing as
power and surrender alternate;
the paradoxical contradictory
mixture of shared knowledge
with subjective ignorance,
familiarity with inventiveness,
safety with danger. Although
the audience is (probably
deliberately) alienated most
of the time, we are unexpectedly
moved when Sarah encounters
the unexpected, as her husband
unprecedentedly changes the
rules of the game and she
flounders around trying to
catch on to what he now intends.
The plays are strangely unerotic,
but, again, this may be what
playwright and production
intend. When sex per se actually
happens - under a table, in
The
Lover,
it just seems ludicrous. Pinter
seems to be saying that without
all the fantastic embellishment
with which we surround it,
sex wouldn't even 'be ' sex.
Jane
O'Grady |
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