Writer: Harold Pinter
Director: Em Dulson and Karl Falconer
It is by definition the most trite and predictable thing to say about any Harold Pinter play that it is “Pinteresque” – the tight, aggressive sentences; the clipped comments; the debates over language; the need to dominate others, and accompanying fear of being dominated; and the pauses, of course, the pauses. The decision by Liverpool’s PurpleDoor, returning to Smock Alley after touring Joe Orton’s Loot last year, to bring two strikingly distinct Pinter plays over four nights, then, is a welcome one. Old Times hews closer to Pinter’s typical form, but Betrayal is more personal, slightly more traditional, and does not engage in the epic, ambiguous power struggles for which he was best known.
Em Dulson and Karl Falconer share directing duties, and appear in the play they do not direct – the former as Emma in Betrayal, the latter as Deeley in Old Times, and there is poise and balance to both productions. Pinter’s work can prompt indulgence, and the sense that the performers are extracting joy at the awareness of the audience’s confusion; in both cases this is avoided, with the lost souls of Old Times, in particular, as confused as we are. Although Deeley battles for dominance with his wife Kate (Madeleine Lloyd Jones) and her friend Anna (Emilia Lea), by the end there is no winner, and little sense of reality to grasp at.
The sparse stage helps remove the prospect of establishing a knowable reality, and Lea, in particular, is icily, but not bloodlessly, threatening. Falconer has an oily sense of unearned confidence, which occasionally tips into the camp and the frantic, but never beyond the point of no return. Jones is wonderful as the blank Kate, until she no longer needs to be, and her dangerous potential is fulfilled. For fans of classic Pinter, this is a restrained, well-paced performance of a play that will hit many of the right notes, and yet slides into a bizarre ending.
Betrayal is precisely what you would expect from its title; the story of an affair told in reverse, it focuses Jerry (Will Medland), Emma (Dulson), and her husband, and Jerry’s best friend, Robert (Charlie Forrest). Jerry and Emma begin by meeting for the first time in two years, and follows both couples through houses and flats in London and Italy over nine years. Based on Pinter’s own affairs, it drops the stylistic features common to his early works, and focuses on how people live when they are deceiving their loved ones. There is no hint of moralism, but neither is this a mea culpa; it is a thing that happens, and little more. Forrest is wonderful as the betrayed husband; awkward but evil, with as much pain as menace in how he dismisses modern literature. Medland and Dulson have genuine physical chemistry, and Falconer’s light directing lets the piece breathe in a quite beautiful way.
Working with the plays of a truly great writer isn’t always as easy as you would hope; we’ve all seen terrible Beckett, Williams, or Ibsen. These two productions are subtle and delicate, pairing fine performances with superb writing, and with any luck, PurpleDoor will make even more trips across the Irish Sea in the near future.
Runs Until 5th December 2024.
The Review's Hub Score
Pinteresque – but also not
