Writer: Harold Pinter
Director: James Haddrell
Harold Pinter’s one-act plays from early in his career are full of foreboding, ambiguity and a psychological threat which is often manifested as much in the audience’s mind as in the playwright’s own intentions.
Such is the case in Greenwich Theatre’s double bill, which starts with 1958’s A Slight Ache. Kerrie Taylor and Jude Akuwudike play Flora and Edward, a middle-aged couple for whom their greatest problem initially seems to be a wasp bothering them as they take tea in the garden.
The couple differ on the wasp’s malevolent nature – Edward is snottily dismissive of his wife’s assertion that the insects bite, rather than sting – even as they work together to capture it.
Quickly another irritant enters the scene: an old match-seller, who stands silently every day on the country road outside the couple’s garden. Like a wasp, he would be capable of coexisting with those around him, but his mere presence is too much for Edward to bear.
Pinter originally wrote A Slight Ache for radio, and so the couple’s enticing in of the match-seller, and the destruction his silent presence wreaks on their marriage, is far more psychological: one is never sure if the man actually exists. On stage, however, we must see this mysterious man. Tony Mooney, decked out in a mildew-stained raincoat, face barely visible, is a slow-moving presence whose stature and presence provide that same sense of dread.
Nevertheless, the physical presence of the match-seller before us means that as the couple describe what they see in him, and how they interpret such visions, a greater suspension of disbelief is required of us. So, too, must we have a confidence in the actors’ ability to get us to see through their eyes. Thankfully, both Taylor and Akuwudike succeed. While our own perception of the match-seller matches neither Edward’s decrepit, glass-eyed man on the brink of death, nor Flora’s sexually alluring young man, it is capable to see him as such through their performance.
The play retains elements of sexism: Edward is brutishly dismissive and accusatory of his wife, especially when she suggests she approach the match-seller as her husband flees to safety. What could be a character tic – Flora’s husband seems quite the sort of man who believes women to be a weaker sex, despite evidence to the contrary – Pinter follows up Edward’s remarks by making Flora live down to his expectations. The playwright also has the woman’s increasingly sexual attraction to the stranger start with an admission that he reminds her of a man who once raped her, which feels like the misogyny comes less from character and more from the pen of the writer.
Despite that, the cast rises to meet the psychologically ambiguous implications of Pinter’s ending. The implication of some kind of temporal loop – earlier in the piece, Edward tell this wife that he has abandoned his writings on colonialism to create essays on the nature of space-time – ensures that the piece goes out on a high.
The double bill concludes with a better-known Pinter work from the same era. In The Dumb Waiter, Mooney and Akuwudike are two hitmen waiting for an assignment in a dingy basement.
Pinter’s trademark use of repetition and pieces of sparse, occasionally repetitive, dialogue draws out the couple’s relationship to one another – Mooney’s Ben, the calmer, senior assassin, slightly exasperated by the nervy, ever questioning attitude of Akuwudike’s Gus.
As they’re waiting for news, the assignment starts to be interrupted by the dumbwaiter at the back of the room, with requests for food that the hitmen, with barely more than a teabag and a non-functioning gas stove, are unable to supply. Pinter’s penchant for absurdism and symbolism in this piece has frequently been compared to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and it’s easy to see why: the characters’ actions and reactions move further and further away from realism as their wait progresses.
There’s a level to which Ben and Gus’s communications with each other become like those of a dumbwaiter: something is communicated, and the reciprocal response comes later, slightly detached and not always what was asked for.
The Dumb Waiter is a play about imbalances of power: between Ben and Gus, between the hitmen and their unseen paymaster, between classes (the only decoration in the room is a photograph of a cricket team, a sport alien to the football-loving men). Pinter’s work is often open to multiple, equally valid interpretations: what is clear is that when Gus starts questioning his role in all these hierarchies, his days are numbered.
And that is a theme that means one can see why these two pieces have been brought together: themes of confrontation, change and the fear involved overlap between the pair of plays. It does make for a rather draining couple of hours, though. Leaving the Greenwich Theatre into the late summer dusk, one yearns for the company of likeable people who enjoy, rather than endure, each other’s presence; for an antidote to Pinter’s misanthropy.
Continues until 3 June 2023
The Reviews Hub Score
Draining
