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Donmar Warehouse, London
I find it strange that one of Harold Pinter's most accessible plays has had to wait 18 years for a major London revival. It deals, after all, with mortality, love, loss and separation: subjects that touch us all. But at least it's now back in a fine-tuned production by Bijan Sheibani which, even though a little short on humour, shows desperate people yearning to make contact across the chasms that divide them.
Pinter presents us with two distinct locations. One is occupied by Andy, an irascible, dying ex-civil servant tended by his wife, Bel, whose quietude conceals a certain steel. The other area, a shabby bedsit, is inhabited by Andy's estranged sons, Jake and Fred, who pass their days playing fantasy games about father-figures. Two other characters appear as if plucked out of memory: Maria, Andy's former mistress, and her husband Ralph, a onetime soccer referee. Meanwhile, the ghost of Andy and Bel's daughter, Bridget, hovers over the action as if marooned in a permanent state of teenage uncertainty.
Donne's line that "no man is an island" was one of Pinter's favourites; and what he shows, in this heartbreaking play, is that even when separated by death, distance or unhealed wounds, people still ache to connect. Sheibani's production picks up on this by showing how actions in one area reverberate elsewhere. Andy's sons suddenly react to one of his bellows of rage, the bed-bound Fred echoes his father's dying posture and at one point Andy, Bel and Bridget form a triangle as if the living and the dead are eternally linked. All this gives the play an extraordinary fluidity and a sense of our unending hunger for contact: what it underestimates is Pinter's violent disjunctions of tone and his gift for comic riffs as in Ralph's dismissal of cognitive thought as "like farting Annie Laurie down a keyhole".
The performances, however, are exceptional. David Bradley's Andy is all spleen and scatalogical anger concealing an apprehension of death and a deep, unappeasable longing to see his sons. Deborah Findlay also subtly suggests that Bel, in her quiet way, is as much a verbal warrior as her husband and equally filled with a profound sense of grief over her lost sons. And that sadness extends to Daniel Mays and Liam Garrigan, who, in the crucial scene where Jake and Fred respond to Bel's phone call by posing as a Chinese laundry, suggest they too long to bridge the emotional divide. Of all Pinter's plays, this is the one that speaks most directly to common experience and it is good to see it so sensitively revived.
