I’m not surprised that Harold Pinter dramatised one of Oliver Sacks’s neurological case histories. A Kind of Alaska is about Deborah (Anna Calder-Marshall), who wakes up in a clinic after having been asleep for 29 years. She doesn’t know: she chatters away like her 18-year-old self. The past is in her present now, in a no man’s land of time, and her present hardly exists. “You were nowhere,” says the man (Niall Buggy) who cared for her. True, but where is she now? The self she thinks she is faces the self she doesn’t know she is. This is a haunting play, itself haunted by Pinter’s preoccupation, both poetic and psychological, about how we live in and out of time, how memory traps you and deceives you.

Diana Hardcastle is Deborah’s sister, and she also appears in A Slight Ache. Flora’s husband (Michael Byrne) sees himself as a man’s man: master of his house, knows nothing about flowers and stuff. Outside, a silent match-seller. Is he a threat? What does he want? The play is about fear and how you deceive yourself by trying to disarm the enemy: social reality is made sinister by an eerie sense of symbolism.

Both plays are directed by Thea Sharrock and Claire Lovett with masterful atmosphere and character. A terrific double bill. Four stars

A Whistle in the Dark
Tricycle

If Tom Murphy’s play (1960) had been written by Synge, it would have been howled off the stage by patriots for besmirching the Irish character. To save Murphy the embarrassment, the Abbey theatre rejected it. Murphy belongs to the great tradition of Synge and O’Casey: he loves Ireland and despairs of its talent for self-destruction. This is a play of tribal self-destruction. Dada (Gary Whelan) is the father of six sons. They are the Fighting Carneys. He and five sons invade the home of the sixth, Michael (Patrick O’Kane), who emigrated to England. He hasn’t done too well, but he’s a white-collar man now and married to an English girl, and the tribe is unforgiving. Their chance comes when they go off to fight a local Irish gang and Michael refuses to join them. This is a cruel play; Murphy takes no hostages. Jacob Murray’s production is hugely powerful: the Carneys are tribal predators in a state of permanent fury, but Murray brings out unerringly their different characters, and the air of belligerence is firmly controlled. This is a prominent play, and Murray does it proud. Three stars

Members Only
Trafalgar Studios

There’s nothing wrong with light entertainment, as this elegant 90-minute piece by Fabrice Roger-Lacan nimbly demonstrates. Translated from the French by Christopher Campbell, it’s about two architects in a partnership. They have just won a contract. It’s also the 40th birthday of Bernard (Robert Bathurst), and his wife is giving him a surprise party. He knows, but it’s still a surprise. That’s marriage. Adrien (Nicolas Tennant), who is also a friend, can’t come. Why? It’s the monthly dinner at his club. The club is news to Bernard. Sounds bizarre. And why don’t you put me up for membership? Bernard is touchy, Adrien is evasive. Tempers rise. That’s friendship. FR-L, who takes care not to be too serious, is saying that it’s volatile, difficult, fraught with dangerous jealousies. The play is like a sketch by Anouilh, but with little of Anouilh’s psychological cunning and none of his sentimentality or his cruelty: irony without iron. The actors are excellent, rope-dancing skilfully between the devil of seriousness and the deep blue sea of boulevard polish. Three stars

Smaller
Lyric

I’ve nothing against Carmel Morgan’s play except it being in a West End theatre. Any theatre. It’s a half-hour sitcom thinly stretched out as a two-hour play, full of flat, cutesy writing and plodding jokes. Maureen (June Watson), crippled by arthritis, is the invalid from hell: domineering and whingeing. Daughter Bernice (Dawn French), teacher, joker and professional martyr, cares for her heroically. Daughter Cath (Alison Moyet) escaped long ago, to work as a singer in Spain. The ending is of the laugh-through-tears, bone-crunchingly sentimental variety. For God’s sake, no more celebrity theatre. One star