'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