Mark Ford's review of Three by Pinter was published in the TLS of May 29, 1998.

"There are two silences", Harold Pinter observed in a speech in 1962. "One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed." Deborah, in A Kind of Alaska (1982), has been silent for twenty-nine years; she fell asleep when she was sixteen, one of the many victims (estimates put the total at 5 million) of the sleeping sickness charted by Oliver Sacks in Awakenings. Pinter lyrically imagines her as having entered "a kind of Alaska . . . quite remote . . . utterly foreign territories".

A Kind of Alaska is Pinter's least characteristic work. All his earlier plays (up to Betrayal of 1978) explore particular but unexceptional social milieux.

"When a character cannot be comfortably defined or understood in terms of the familiar," he remarked in the same lecture, "the tendency is to perch him on a symbolic shelf, out of harm's way." Deborah is more of a case-history than that, but she is still far out of harm's way; her predicament, though clearly fascinating to Pinter, is too unique to allow him to generate the half-exhilarated, half-appalled complicity in patterns of menace and conflict that suffuse his work as a whole.

Deborah (wonderfully performed by Penelope Wilton) awakens under the influence of a newly developed drug, L-DOPA. Her doctor and her sister (who are married) attempt to convey as much of the reality of her situation as they feel she can endure, but for the most part stand as mute witnesses to her flood of disjointed recollections – her other kind of silence. As the effects of the drug wear off, she slips agonizingly back into coma: "The light is going. They're shutting up shop. Chains and padlocks. Bolting me up."

It is tempting, but perhaps unwise, to see the play as figuring the mysteries of creativity, or even Pinter's own artistic Alaska: over the last two decades, he has written only one full-length play and a handful of shorter pieces that appear almost like an epilogue to the vast and varied body of work he produced between 1958 and 1978.

The Collection and The Lover both derive from the early 1960s, when Pinter was at his most prolific. He appears himself in this production of The Collection, as Harry, who shares an opulently furnished house in Belgravia with his protege Bill, an up-and-coming clothes designer. The Collection was Pinter's first embodiment of what developed into one of his most obsessive themes, sexual infidelity; the drama of erotic betrayal appears on some level in almost every play written since, including his two most recent, Moonlight (1993) and Ashes to Ashes (1996). Bill may or may not have spent the night with Stella (who, with her husband, James, runs a nearby boutique) while on a business trip to a dress collection in Leeds.

The outraged James (Douglas Hodge) confronts the smooth, mendacious Bill (Colin McFarlane), while his irascible older lover-cum-patron sets about persuading Stella (Lia Williams) that she made the whole thing up. In a brilliant series of cat-and-mouse interviews, each member of the quartet struggles to gain the upper hand. The play is one of Pinter's most compelling studies of the volatile micro-climate of sexual politics, but this production never really creates the edgy intensity it deserves, or received in the superb television version that starred Laurence Oliver and Malcolm McDowell. The split stage the play requires in the theatre is messily designed, and the acting uneven. The production also features the worst prop I have ever seen on stage – a shapeless bit of fur I though at first was a muff, but suddenly realized was supposed to be a cat.

The director Joe Harmston's crucial mistake is to present the play – and The Lover also – in contemporary settings rather than as period pieces, works heralding the dawn of the swinging 1960s. Indeed, The Lover is even more insistently a product of its era, and when given a contemporary staging is in danger of seeming both banal and ludicrous.

It deals, like The Collection, with the part fantasy – in particular, the fantasy of betrayal – plays in erotic relationships. Richard and Sarah are a middle-class married couple living near Windsor. He commutes to his job in the City, and she stays at home. To spice up their sexual relations, they create for themselves a number of saucy alter egos who role-play various pornographic scenarios: Richard (Hodge) metamorphoses into Max, a bit of rough, while Sarah (Williams) dons high-heels and a low-cut dress.

In the central scene, they enact a series of erotic vignettes that include a drum (he bangs on it and she scratches around it with her fingers), much byplay with cigarettes, and a mini-narrative; he's a lower-class park-keeper, and she's a belle trapped in his hut. This is all pretty excruciating, though it might have appeared outre and courageous back in 1962, the year before Philip Larkin's annus mirabilis, when sexual intercourse at last began "Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first LP."

Harold Pinter
THREE BY PINTER
Donmar Warehouse

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