Trafalgar Studios

When you enter the theatre to see Harold Pinter’s 1958 play, there are already two figures lying beneath blankets on rusty beds in a room that otherwise consists of neon lights, a stone floor and, on the walls, tiles that were once white but are now smeared or broken or both. Then one gets up and begins coolly to read a paper. He’s Jason Isaacs’s trim-looking Ben.

Then the other half-wobbles, half-topples out of bed, stretches and begins to blunder about.

He’s Lee Evans’s Gus and, boy, is he a mess. His toes stick out of a sock. His hair is a matted frizz. He has a goofy, confused look. His shoulders sag and arms droop, simian-style. He proceeds to jam on a shoe that turns out to have a squashed matchbox inside. You wouldn’t trust him to make an efficient job of killing a beetle, let alone help to murder the person he and Ben expect soon to walk into their basement lair.

That’s right, both are assassins waiting for their prey in the abandoned kitchen beneath a disused café in Birmingham. Towards the end they prepare for the evening’s business in black suits and ties, like the robbers in Reservoir Dogs. It’s as if Tarantino is collaborating with the late Tony Hancock, for the conversation glumly yet comically meanders, with Evans’s Gus complaining about the lack of blankets, a good cup of tea, even a nice view of Birmingham, and Isaacs’s Ben wearily shutting him up.

Mustn’t reveal the denouement. Enough to say that Pinter, though not the open dissident he is today, wasn’t an apolitical animal in 1958. Ben is the conformist who obeys orders without hesitation. But Gus is dissatisfied, inquisitive, and, by my reckoning, asks 110 questions during an hour-long play. Guess which one upsets their employer, an unnamed but clearly huge organisation with as few scruples as — well, fill in its modern counterparts for yourselves.

The play hasn’t dated at all, though it’s an early example of Pinter’s so-called comedies of menace. Harry Burton’s fine revival generates plenty of menace, notably when a dumb waiter comes banging down with absurd requests for food, indicating the presence of some taunting, dangerous bigwig above. Dark comedy is everywhere, notably in the assassins’ quarrel about whether it’s correct to say “light the kettle” or “light the gas” — indicating their stress in Pinter’s famously oblique style.

Both actors communicate that stress, Isaacs through a tensing of the face and body, Evans through escalating chaos and, finally, distraction and panic. The over-the-top folk now performing Pinter’s sketches at the Haymarket should study Evans’s performance, for it shows you don’t have to strain for laughter to be funny. You must simply be truthful, expressing the character’s innate anxiety, vulnerability and gormlessness — and you’ll be as brilliantly effective as Evans is.

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