It is ten years since Harold Pinter died. Appropriately enough for such a significant anniversary, this Pinter season is hugely ambitious. Curated by the director Jamie Lloyd, it boasts no less than 20 of his short plays and a starry cast of so many A-listers that the hoary old collective noun “galaxy” can be wheeled out without it feeling too hyperbolic.
This first tranche is divided into sections entitled Pinter One and Pinter Two. The former is a clutch of sketches and shorts, the funniest of which is the world premiere of The Pres And An Officer. It is performed variously by guest stars and imagines a president so dumb — surely not — that he nukes London believing that it is the capital of France.
It is the kind of sketch that wouldn’t look out of place on America’s satirical TV show Saturday Night Live. Centre stage is Donald Trump, played on this night by Rufus Hound, complete with The Donald’s hair, the long red tie dividing his rotunda into two ample halves and those distinctive hand gesticulations that are infinitely more precise than his sentences. What fun.
Yet the mood of the first part’s eight works, all directed by Lloyd (except Ashes to Ashes which is directed by Lia Williams), is overwhelmingly political rather than satirical. And although each is written with the precise potent language of Pinter’s better known works, they are infected by the simplistic world view of the virtue signaller.
The most harrowing is One for the Road in which Sir Antony Sher plays a tyrannical country’s torturer-in-chief. His victims in this 25 minute play are a family of three, with the mother (Kate O’Flynn), father (Paapa Essiedu) and seven-year-old each having their harrowing moment with Sher’s pitiless Nicolas, who believes in the Old Testament’s God, but is “very far from Jewish”.
Sher is on fantastic form. An utterly malign presence. But as with the other works here, Pinter’s point — how the powerful abuse their power — is hardly revelatory. Pinter’s old friend, tennis partner and fellow playwright Ronald Harwood once told me that when Pinter became overtly political and critical of the West, especially America, it always seemed slightly bewildering to Harwood, as the Pinter he knew when they were young, though by no means immature,“didn’t know who the prime minister was.” That memory fits snugly with Pinter’s political plays which are written with the broad truisms of a fortune teller.
Atrocity is bad and really should be opposed, is the main message. Thanks for that, Harold. What else you got?
Well, plenty as it happens. Part Two has the much more intriguing Pinter miniatures, The Lover (1962) and The Collection (1961) . In the latter David Suchet’s fantastically arch thespian-type Harry is an utter delight as he attempts to control his insolent young lover Bill, played by Russell Tovey.
There are more gems later in the season and they all the more enticing because Pinter’s amateur politics would have been parked by then.
