Most dramatists write about the parts of the human personality that we can see, hear and get to know. Harold Pinter has always been interested in the three quarters that doesn’t break the surface but lurks, iceberg-like, darkly and dangerously beneath; and nowhere more than in the two fascinating, funny, elusive one-acters he wrote for television in the early 1960s.

Both plays involve intimate relationships, mainly marriage. Both involve mistrust and the difficulty of knowing whether other people mean what they say and say what they mean. Both involve not quite being sure what you yourself want and are. And both remind you that Pinter was an actor, capable of writing roles that, in Jamie Lloyd’s revival, challenge Gina McKee, Richard Coyle, Timothy West and Charlie Cox to find subtlety and ambiguity in their performances.

What happened during the night that exercises everyone in The Collection, the one when Cox’s Bill may have met McKee’s Stella at a dress-designing convention in Leeds? Did their encounter end up in her bedroom and, if so, who did the seducing? Whatever the facts, the result isn’t just an exercise in dramatic obfuscation.

Perhaps Stella claims there was a one-night fling in order to provoke her husband, Coyle’s Richard. Perhaps Bill, who has an older lover in the form of West’s Harry, eventually confirms them because he wants to assert his maleness, or taunt Richard, or stir things up with Harry, or, conceivably, tell the truth.

Lloyd doesn’t wholly solve the problems posed by the play’s television origins by giving us an Ayckbourn-style setting where we simultaneously witness Harry’s dour house, Richard’s sleek flat and a London street.

But the acting is mostly immaculate, with Coyle and West expressing their inner anger and frustration in oblique Pinteresque ways (an aggressive demand for olives here, a crumpled newspaper there), a pale McKee looking close to breakdown, and Cox accentuating Bill’s casual insolence, maybe at the cost of the sulky resentment inside him.

Stop reading if you don’t want to know The Lover’s central revelation, though it comes quickly and isn’t so unpredictable. When Coyle’s Richard leaves for the office, he offhandedly asks his wife, McKee’s Sarah, if her lover is paying a visit. She says yes, the doorbell rings, and there’s Richard again, his brown suit now replaced with a leather jacket, his name amended to Max. Meanwhile McKee has replaced her 1950s frock with a slinky black number. He’s her lover, she’s his “whore”: their solution to the divide, also evident in the period accents, between marital respectability and extramarital desire.

It’s a brilliant idea given dramatic energy and added meaning by a mini-crisis in which Richard-cum-Max tries to stop the pretence. Why? Is he weary of the emotional split inside himself that the charades imply?

Does he crave personal wholeness? Or just want new games, fresh stimuli?

See the play, enjoy it and take your educated pick. Box office: 0870 0606637

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