Was just checking in to see if anyone has caught Pinter 6. Going to see it v. early in the New Year.
I caught Pinter 6 tonight, and Pinter 5 last Saturday night. As usual, the even-numbered one ends with big laughs, and is the night you can (more) safely invite Pinter first-timers to, without being berated for being pretentious.
For me, though, both nights are must-sees, as Pinter Five has an amazing production of Pinter's first play ("The Room") and Pinter Six has a peerless production of Pinter's last play ("Celebration").
Both nights have short running times that will make Showgirl smile, with Pinter Five running at 2 hours (including one interval) and Pinter Six running an even nippier 1 hour 40 minutes (including one interval).
Some spoilers follow. . .
Pinter Five is very Pintery (all baffling unexplained menace and disconnection) and wouldn't be a show I'd take a Pinter virgin to.
Even the comic relief mid-play, "Victoria Station," (which immediately follows the interval) is only ten minutes or so, and director Patrick Marber dilutes the copious laughs significantly by foregrounding sinister elements of the play. Specifically, in a play in which a taxi-controller (Colin McFarlane) gets all Basil Fawlty with a renegade taxi-driver (Rupert Graves), Marber chooses to (realistically) depict Grave's character as if in a dazed stupor of spaced out trauma, from the start, that infects the audience with trepidation, such that McFarlane's taught, increasingly coiled, hilarious performance cannot work it's full comic magic. That's not a criticism, just an observation, as the combination of tension and laughs proves a potent cocktail.
Concluding the second half is "Family Voices," a radio play in which Marber effectively visualises the unsafe spaces in which all members of a disconnected family exist. Still, it's a radio play, and it would probably still work better that way, as concretising and physicalising the play, removes a layer of the tragic disconnect you'd get from people being reduced to disembodied voices. Still, Luke Thallon is creepily superb as he describes in detail to his Mum (Jane Horrocks), in a letter he appears never to post, how an underage girl rested her feet in his crotch. He also tells her about a strange man called "Riley."
Both the taxi in "Victoria Station" and the room Luke Thallon boards in feel like unsafe spaces, the theme of Pinter Five, I feel. And the most unsafe space of all is the eponymous "The Room" of the brilliantly produced and acted opening play.
In "The Room," Jane Horrocks is a head-scarfed Hilda Ogden type, nattering on about the wonders of the room she shares with her husband, Rupert Graves. Outside, upstairs and downstairs, all fill her with horror, and with every knock at the door, she panics that those untold horrors will invade the sovereignty of her treasured room.
As an aside, if the room were England, upstairs Scotland, and downstairs France and Europe, then this is the most Brexit-themed play I've ever seen, as themes of sovereignty, xenophobia, disconnection and general fear, are rife, with the festering relationship within the Room's inhabitants proving as unstable as any danger without.
Indeed, the opening scene of this play is positively virtuosic for the sheer duration Pinter raises our anticipation of Graves and Horrocks actually communicating with each other, by delaying that event from happening.
As one unwelcome interloper, Nicholas Woodeson is especially wonderful as "the landlord" of the Room: in the assuming way he takes a chair, in the smooth staccato way he speaks, in the sudden unexpected sadness of a story he tells.
And like in "Family Voices," there is again, a mysterious character called Riley, here played by McFarlane, who matters a great deal.
I'd give "The Room" 4 and a half stars, "Victoria Station" 4 stars, and "Family Voices" 3 and a half stars.
Pinter Six, directed by Jamie Lloyd, is a night of two halves, a weaker play (strong of language, weak on character), "Party Time," followed by a masterpiece, "Celebration," Pinter's last play.
The plays do fit together hand in glove, as both feature a pile of wealthy plonkers congregating in self-congratulation.
"Party Time" is a weak play because it is so thin and obvious in it's intentions, to suggest that wealthy people are psychopaths who care about nobody but themselves, determined to squash "the other" underfoot.
So while some will rail against Lloyd's directorial decision to make the play even more obvious, by lining the characters up in chairs in their social pecking order, like the famous John Cleese-Two Ronnies sketch, so the characters stage right (audience left) are lower, with Eleonor Matsuura the most disdained, and those stage left (audience right) higher in the hierarchy, with Lady Celia Imrie the most venerated, I loved that choice. It streamlines the social power games in the same simple way Pinter intended, reinforcing the clarity of Pinter's observations about how we treat those above and below us in the hierarchy.
Somewhere in the middle of the hierarchy, John Simm is particularly excellent, with his scoffing spitting nastiness to his wife on his right as snarling as his Uriah creeping to the characters on his left was unctuous.
Lloyd creates a supremely sinister atmosphere, with an ominous slowly opening and closing central door behind the characters ever-threatening to swallow them. Fittingly, Abraham Popoola's outsider, from beyond the door, gets the final word.
By contrast to "Party Time," "Celebration" feels like the same play, but staged with real people, people with wants and needs that dive far deeper than who gets to stomp on who.
These characters still vie viciously for power, like in "Party Time," but mostly against their spouses, and mostly because they are yearning and lonely. The cruelty and incestuousness of their preoccupations and family relations seem to be out of a desperate need to connect, and consequently, we relate to them, even though they are boorish and crass and ignorant and spiteful. And this recognition of ourselves in such characters make them funny.
And what is more, this cast is one of the most tremendous comic casts I've ever seen for this sort of backbiting, all of them experts in the creation of boorish crass spiteful ignorant behaviour to the nth degree! This is one of the best ensembles I've ever seen for this sort of thing: a kind of best of show of uncouthness: where Ron Cook's quick cuts compete against Tracey-Ann Oberman's glass-eyed burns, Phil Davis' snarling sputum stutters against Celia Imrie's matter-of-fact preciseness; and John Simm's sly strutting snark more than meets its match in the immense sarcastic sneakiness of Katherine Kingsley (she had me laughing like a drain, as boorish as the characters).
And in this play, unlike in "Party Time," the servants are also twats, with the waiter (an abrasive, invasive, terrific Abraham Popoola, who gets the last word in this play as well), maitre de (a smooth as silk Gary Kemp) and hostess (a sly and ego-swollen Eleanor Matsuura): all self-indulgently, snipingly shaking their pride-filled sticks of cultural snobbery at their less-educated guests.
There are so many comic bullets firing everywhere in this production, that I could have watched it for double its forty minute length, and not noticed the time passing.
"Celebration" is to be celebrated, I feel, a gem of a humorous production, with the best cast of the year! A treat, for me, before Xmas creates similarly crass and spiteful celebrations like these for all the rest of us lol (maybe not this year, fingers crossed).
Anyway, "Party Time" gets 4 stars from me, and "Celebration" gets a full 5 stars!
? Not because the playlet ends on wonderful moment but because what is happening is so dull I found myself pondering her reaction to the internet, to social media etc rather than caring about what was actually on stage.
