Finding Harold: A Pinter at the Pinter Season Review

Six months ago, the thought of a season dedicated to Pinter, let’s face it, sounded like a drag, a potential slog through 20 one-act plays and sketches full of weird scenarios, aggressive encounters and endless pauses. But as lovers of drama “this will be good for me” you may have thought, Pinter is beloved of actors and directors, an important voice in the landscape who like Brecht and Beckett we have to learn to appreciate – the equivalent of our theatrical fibre, you know it’s good for you but you don’t have to like it.

What has actually occurred in the last six months is nothing less than astonishing as Jamie Lloyd’s Pinter at the Pinter season has transformed hearts and minds, showing us the genius and humanity of a multi-stranded writer whose plays remain as relevant and meaningful as they were in the 1960s. By finally letting the audience in on the secrets of Pinter’s success and making a case for his work in the mainstream, this is how Jamie Lloyd et al has taught us not just to like and understand Pinter, but to love him.

• The Context

Prior to this game-changing season, there has been plenty of Pinter to see in the last few years with high calibre productions filled with star names. Lloyd himself directed two at the Trafalgar Studios – The Hothouse and The Homecoming with a fantastic cast that included Pinter-veteran John Simm in both alongside Ron Cook, Gary Kemp, Simon Russell Beale and Gemma Chan. A major revival of No Man’s Land toured the UK with legendary theatre knights Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, while 2018 began with an impressive production of The Birthday Party also at the Harold Pinter Theatre directed by Ian Rickson and starring Toby Jones, Zoe Wannamaker and Stephen Mangan.

All of these productions were great, all weird, menacing, peculiar experiences that were entertainingly bizarre. They created a chink through which you could sit back and appreciate Pinter’s (then) niche appeal, his focus on unsettling tone and illusory perspectives rather than straightforward narrative and character development. Did we understand these plays? Maybe. Did we love them? Probably not. Using the same criteria for assessing last year’s disappointing Oscar Wilde season, let’s see how Jamie Lloyd changed our minds.

• Play Selection is Crucial

Building an entire season around rarely seen short works and grouping them together in thematic collections was a stroke of genius. The advantage of this for an audience is the feeling of assortment, knowing that if one piece was less entertaining or meaningful then in 10-30 minutes the next play or sketch might be more appealing. The anthology approach offers plenty of variety in one night, making explicit connections between quite different types of work and  thereby reinforcing the central premise that our perspective on Pinter’s output has been unfairly narrowed by his most revived plays.

Pinter is, Lloyd has forcefully argued, an ever-relevant commentator whose writing incorporates the full spectrum of human experience, that it has a universality that beneath the strange structure and scenarios makes him a major and enduring figure in theatre history. And the timelessness of Pinter’s subject matter was infused through the seven thematic collections, beginning with a set of stories including Mountain Language, One for the Road and Ashes to Ashes that examined the totalitarian state, the shifting balance of power in society and the slow erosion of individual rights that leads to violence.

Playing in repertory, Lloyd changed pitch completely in Pinter Two with the oft-combined The Lover and The Collection that examined the politics of relationships, of fantasy role-play and unconventionality. Pinter Three and Four also applied contrasting themes, the latter using Moonlight and Night School to think about external intrusion into the domestic sphere and the complexities of family life, while placing these alongside exquisite productions looking at love and absence – Landscape and A Kind of Alaska – making us see Pinter’s ability to write deep emotion for the first time. Pinter Three was a powerful experience amplified by Lee Evans heartbreaking Monologue which remains one of the seasons most memorable events, one that felt utterly transformative in shifting our perspective on Pinter.

The fifth collection continued to focus on isolation and physical separation finding poignancy beneath the comic in Victoria Station and particularly Family Voices, an exchange of letters between mother and son. This was contrasted with the class-based falsity of pre-selected communities in Pinter Six’s Party Time and Celebration, before concluding with A Slight Ache and The Dumb Waiter showcasing the absurdity of language and the rhythm of Pinter’s dialogue. The breadth of Pinter’s work has been gratifying to see, evolving throughout the season and carefully curated to reveal a writer whose multifaceted output elicited deeper meaning the more of it we saw.

• Vary the Presentation

It has been said many times during the series, but Jamie Lloyd has the most finely calibrated understanding of Pinter of any modern director and this gave his team the confidence to break free of the original period settings and to deliver each anthology with a slightly different, but undeniably modern, approach that underscored the generality of Pinter’s themes. Where Dominic Dromgoole’s Wilde season stuck to its rigid historical focus (much to its detriment), Lloyd and season designer Soutra Gilmour had a clear, stylised vision for each production, united by a series of common factors including the large rotating cube in various states of deconstruction, and the visible “backstage” detritus that lent artificiality at the right moments.

The effect created layers of meaning within the design that united individual collections under their thematic banner whilst also ensuring that they were visibly part of the overall vision for the season. Through careful management of visual clues, Jon Clark’s lighting design and George Dennis’s sound and music choices, every time the curtain went up the audience undoubtedly knew they were at a Pinter at the Pinter performance.

It all began with a clear statement of intent, the lurking fear and intensity of Pinter One became a core feature of the stark, grey and intimidating design, with plenty of shadows creating dark corners. This is not the way Pinter’s work had been visualised before, and it set the standard for no ordinary season to come. And so it proved to be, every production offered a different approach, from the heightened reality and colour saturation of 60s sex comedy The Lover right through to the creepy radio booth of a A Slight Ache, each design slightly separate from those that had come before while beautifully serving the themes and content of the work.

The most visually exciting and directorially daring, was Pinter Six in which Lloyd employed very little movement and instead organised his actors in a line during Party Time, each stepping forward to deliver their scenes. The purposefully static nature of these decisions showed a season full of confidence, revelling in an intensity amplified by Gilmour’s monochrome design. As a now dedicated Pinter audience, we were pushed to focus on the text more completely as the season unfolded, a decision that allowed us to get the most from radio play A Slight Ache and Betrayal which followed.

• Venue and Casting

Holding a Harold Pinter season at the Harold Pinter Theatre is an obvious choice, but the auditorium itself, aside from a series of slim pillars on every level, offers reasonable views from all but the most extreme seats in the Royal Circle and Balcony. Wherever you sit, the audience can feel fairly close to the action and if you booked early enough, you could see the whole season for £15 per show with several marginally restricted view seats in the Dress Circle – a sensible pricing decision for what 8-months ago seemed like an enormous risk. While Betrayal prices are now notably higher, previous season attendees had access to pre-sale tickets for as little as £25, while a weekly Rush scheme was introduced for key workers and those in receipt of social security benefit to see the show for £15, all of which have resulted in what has felt like a relatively diverse audience across the entire run.

Casting, of course, has been one of Pinter at the Pinter’s most notable features and, like the Kenneth Branagh Season in 2016, there has been a clear strategy to align established theatre veterans, those who personally knew Pinter and, most importantly, the industry’s rising stars – reiterating the season’s role in ensuring Pinter’s future survival. Every casting announcement brought fresh excitement with well-known performers including David Suchet, Anthony Sher, Phil Davis, Tamsin Grieg, Celia Imrie and Tracy-Ann Oberman across the run. Rupert Graves was particularly excellent in Pinter Five as a bemused taxi driver before joining with Jane Horrocks for the memorable Family Voices. John Simm excelled as ever in Pinter Six while Janie Dee and Brid Brennan were hilarious as nosey aunts in Night School.

Among the creative team, Lloyd successfully shared the directing honours with Patrick Marber, Lia Williams, and particularly Ed Stamboullian, but it was just as delightful to see substantial roles given to younger actors. Hayley Squires, Papa Essiedu, Gemma Whelan and Kate O’Flynn are well established if arguably not quite household names yet, but each firmly grasped the opportunity that the season offered to deliver excellent performances. And equally we saw brilliant work from actors all but fresh from drama school including Abraham Popoola as waiter with literary pretensions in Celebration, Jessica Barden as the mysterious lodger in Night School, and most impressively from Luke Thallon (soon to be seen alongside Andrew Scott in Present Laughter at the Old Vic) who brought Pinter’s radio play Family Voices so vividly to life in another of those memorable moments that will linger long after the season concludes. Of course, the ever-savvy Lloyd saved his trump cards for the season finale.

• A Grand Finale

If there has been one key feature of the Pinter at the Pinter season it has been never to do things by halves, so with that in mind, why have one season finale when you can have two! The combined excitement of seeing Martin Freeman and, Pinter collaborator, Danny Dyer on stage in The Dumb Waiter promised to be quite an experience when it was announced last summer when Pinter Seven was intended to conclude the series in February. It may have raised eyebrows at the time, but populist casting would drive new audiences into the theatre. In that time, Dyer has transformed himself into a national treasure, and, with a theatre CV that is predominantly West End or equivalent, it proved to be an insightful evening as the central pair delivered a performance that showcased the layers of comic potential in the text to a house packed full of newly won Pinter fans.

Then came Betrayal. Announced only last November when the season was well underway, Pinter’s beautiful 90-minute play about adultery and friendship became the new season finale. The casting of Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox ensured that Pinter at the Pinter would end with one of the year’s most anticipated productions. Fully consistent with the seven insightful anthologies that have come before and visually aligned with the stark simplicity of Pinter One, directed with the precision and choreographical control that Lloyd displayed in Pinter Six, and performed with the intensity and emotional force of Pinter Three, Betrayal is an extraordinary piece of theatre, moving, complex and hugely resonant, the cumulative effect of Pinter’s work over the last 6 months ensuring you’ll never forget this astonishing finale.

• A Point of View

In just six months, Jamie Lloyd’s creative team and ever-changing company of actors has utterly transformed our perspective on Harold Pinter. Where once we went leaden-footed for a night of inexplicable menace, suddenly we were skipping to our seats eager to be wowed by each new perspective on his plays. The range and value of Pinter’s writing, his inestimable effect on the theatrical landscape and the importance of his commentary feels more relevant, timeless and incontrovertible than it ever has.

The Pinter at the Pinter season set out to change our minds, to make us see, understand and really feel the many kinds of writer Pinter was. Anyone planning a production now will (and should) be intimidated by the wonderful clarity this season has brought us, the creative vision so brilliantly and purposefully delivered by all involved and filled with memorable experiences. We are genuinely sad that it’s over. The season has deservedly received huge acclaim, and plenty of applause, but Jamie Lloyd this figurative ovation is just for you for because in this exceptional season of work, you truly taught us all to love Pinter.

The Pinter at the Pinter Season concludes with Betrayal, now running until 8 June, with tickets from £15. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook: Cultural Capital Theatre Blog.

Betrayal – Harold Pinter Theatre

Based on his own real-life affair, Betrayal is the most emotionally resonant and affecting of Pinter’s plays, and a clever choice to mark the end of what has been an astoundingly good season of work from The Jamie Lloyd Company. A key characteristic of Pinter at the Pinter has been to show the extraordinary range, style and depth of the writer’s shorter works, allowing audiences to truly understand the different layers of his writing – the comic Pinter, the political Pinter and, in some of the season’s most memorable moments, the emotive Pinter, able to move an entire room with a turn of phrase.

Betrayal is a profoundly affecting play, one that is not only fully alive on the page but it sings, every line, every word carefully and sparingly chosen bursts with the characters’ repressed feelings, unspoken affections and the acres of unfillable space that opens-up between them as the play unfolds in reverse. And that’s before you add three of our finest actors to the mix, who demonstrate the phenomenal control Pinter had over his dialogue and the effect he intended to create, as well as those famous pauses which far from empty silence are loaded with tension and tragedy in this stunning new production.

The fact that Betrayal is told backwards is more than a fancy dramatic trick, it adds a heavy weight of inevitability to proceedings, showing the audience how easily meaning can change over time and highlighting the various layers of character interactions. Nothing is quite what it seems on the surface, and like real life conversations, the triangular lovers rarely say what they mean, at least not in full. So many incidences referenced with a throw-away remark earlier in the play (but chronologically later) appear different, more loaded when Pinter takes you back to really look at them, while so much is left unsaid or merely inferred. As the sands constantly shift between Emma, Jerry and Robert, Pinter leaves you wondering that if love can so easily disappear, was it ever really there at all?

What is clear from Lloyd’s fascinating interpretation is that the doomed love affair at its heart is the play’s biggest red herring.  There are few directors who understand Pinter better than Lloyd and here the audience is shown several types of duality within the text; first there is a conversational artifice in many of the scenes that belie the different levels of truth that occur throughout the play. These exchanges between the characters can sound a little stilted, even awkward or slightly unreal which here the actors sometimes deliver in a slightly heightened tone. The purpose is two-fold, to show how intimacy sours as close acquaintances and lovers retreat back into reticence – emphasised in the opening scene in which Emma and Jerry meet several years after their affair ended – and secondly to consciously hide their perspective from each other, as Robert frequently does when alone with Jerry.

The second type of duality refers to truth, how honest the characters are about what they’re doing and, crucially, what they already know. For most of Betrayal’s 90-minute run-time, the audience knows more than any one of the characters on stage, and what the characters do know they frequently keep to themselves. It is in only the second scene, after his reunion with Emma that a frantic Jerry learns for the first time that Robert (his best friend) had known about their liaison for some time – and later Pinter takes us back to that rather crucial revelation.

This withholding of truth from Jerry is mirrored in similar instances throughout the play; Emma doesn’t tell Jerry that Robert knows, Jerry never tell Robert about the affair directly, and Robert never confronts Jerry once he does find out. “You don’t seem to understand that I don’t give a shit about any of this” Robert tells him the aftermath, a truth he presumably withheld from his wife as well. The central affair is then a red herring, a betrayal of course but by no means the only, or even the most significant, betrayal in the play.

What Lloyd does to such astonishing effect in this production is to choreograph every single movement with incredible precision. All three actors remain on-stage throughout but appear together in only a limited number of scenes. The “third” person becomes a shadowy presence between whoever is talking, a permanent, ominous other shading the interplay between the talking couple, all inextricably linked by their complex relationship.

Position and movement is key to marking the rhythm of Pinter’s work, and these changes occur to match the different beats in the dialogue with all three performers, whether in the scene or not, changing position at key moments. Using only the project titles that have been a feature of the Pinter at the Pinter season to mark transitions, scenes flow effortlessly into one another, and Lloyd uses this careful repositioning and the double revolve in the centre of a blank impassive box, designed with style by Soutra Gilmour, to change location, time and mood, allowing the interactions to take focus as they become knottier and more weighted with emotion.

In the early scenes, the actors are at odds and kept largely at a distance from each other; Emma and Jerry sit side-by-side for their pub reunion barely seeing the other, while Robert’s confession in the next scene happens with Jerry on the other side of the stage, reflecting the huge emotional hinterland that has opened up between them. Physical proximity comes later when the artifice of conversation and distance fall away to reveal emotional anguish beneath the surface, something which builds slowly but to great effect under Lloyd’s direction.

In many ways it is Robert who is really at the heart of this play and his friendship with Jerry is something both go to extreme lengths to preserve at great cost to themselves. Alone, Jerry and Emma speak often of Robert, and it is the thought of his despair and protection of his friend that sends Jerry immediately to face the music in Scene Two. Likewise, while on holiday in Venice, Jerry is the key subject for Emma and Robert too, when the latter seems more offended not to be referenced in a crucial letter than the revelation that threatens to unravel their lives. Throughout, Emma and Jerry are searching for ways to be close to Robert, his distance sends Emma into the arms of the man who knows him best, while Jerry seeks out Robert’s wife as a way of holding-on to their friendship when marriage and careers send them in opposite directions.

Purposefully, none of the characters are particularly likeable and despite its focus on infidelity it is play without a victim. To avoid the sympathetic cuckold label Robert admits to having hit his wife because he just wanted to give her ‘a good bashing. The old itch… you understand’. Pinter shows us the kind of man he is upfront, not to be pitied and, as we soon discover, just as unfaithful as his wife has been. Like his superbly brutish Coriolanus, and as a genuinely great stage actor, Tom Hiddleston shows us the complexities of Robert’s character, almost coldly withdraw at the start, approaching the end of his marriage with a blasé acceptance that suggests no deeper hurt beneath the bonhomie of his conversation.

Later we come to realise that Robert’s disassociation stems from years of withdrawal from Emma. A crucial scene in which he learns of her affair is superbly played and you see Hiddleston’s Robert achingly hesitant to introduce a conversation that will confirm his worst fears. The uncertainty subtly flickers across his face as he looks for an opening, eventually blundering in unable to restrain himself any longer. What follows is painfully sad as he accepts the news quietly and resignedly, full of those famous pauses loaded with heavy and heartfelt sorry which Hiddleston performs well as Roberts absorbs the shock and falls to into silent contemplation.

In the following section set in the same month, Robert has a strange lunch with Jerry in which he cannot tell his friend he knows the truth. Instead he engages in a brittle and artificial conversation about Venice and the happy moment he spent alone on Torcello. The audience knows this trip occurred after he found out, and while sections of the audience laugh through the overt chomping of melon and prosciutto, what is really going on in this scene is a man desperate for things to seem normal again, swallowing his fears and, sitting across from his greatest friend, trying to decide if he can live with the lie. It’s quietly devastating, and the pain that Hiddleston so subtly suggests is very moving, even deeply tragic, a high point of the show.

Zawe Ashton’s Emma is equally complicated, her adoration of Jerry cast into doubt by the circumstantial spitefulness of her choices. Not only does she throw herself fairly easily (as the final scene suggests) into an affair with her husband’s best friend who drunkenly pays her attention and then calls him the instant her marriage disintegrates, but she is thought to be in the midst of a fresh affair with a writer called Casey who Jerry obviously despises. From the start, Ashton takes Pinter’s cues to suggest a woman whose need to be desired and love of secrecy balances out the declarations of love she makes both to Jerry and eventually Robert.

But Ashton finds the sympathy and humanity in her too. There is a genuine sadness in the break-up scene at their flat in Kilburn as they both come to realise whatever they had has withered. Ashton is excellent throughout often implying that her feeling for Jerry was always so much stronger than his attachment to her, but is particular good in this scene as the atmosphere between them veers between the practicalities of what to do with the flat and its furniture to the wasted opportunity that their mutual lack of effort has engendered. Similarly, she knows exactly what Robert is driving at in Venice where the need to be honest when directly confronted results in loaded silences and long-held stares that Ashton heaps with complex meaning.

As Jerry, Charlie Cox has an equally nuanced and interesting approach to excavating the changing experience of his character. Jerry’s key concern throughout appears to be protecting his friendship with Robert, and while he is occasionally affectionate to Emma at the height of their affair, Cox shows how remote he becomes from her in many of their more intimate scenes. When she speaks he is often slumped in a chair, gives a cursory answer to her entreaties while, at times, is emotionally and physically dismissive or cruel as his work draws the pair apart.

Contrast this with the frantic fear and remorse that Cox demonstrates in Robert’s presence in that crucial second scene, the concern that his friend will despise him dominating all other responses. It is Emma who remembers the details of their affair, times, places and key occurrences, yet Jerry remembers Robert’s speech about reading Yeats on Torcello, taking a keener interest in his friend than his lover. This ambiguity is equally compelling and repellent in Cox’s performance who brings similar layers of meaning to his interactions with the couple he came between. Hiddleston, Ashton and Cox are a superb trio that individually carve out their own characters using Pinter’s precise and evocative dialogue while filling the spaces in between with a growing feeling of heartbreak that builds so well as the play unfolds.

As a finale to the Pinter at the Pinter season, this couldn’t be better, gripping, full of meaning and so very moving. You’ll need a walk home or have a quiet sit down afterwards to properly process it. Betrayal is the kind of play that stirs the feelings, unsettling and savage at times, but also sad and beautiful. With three exceptional performances full of complexity and feeling, innovative direction that enhances the themes of the play and an intensity that grips you entirely, Betrayal is everything you could hope for. The Pinter at the Pinter season has set a very high standard for itself, but what a swansong this has turned out to be.

Betrayal is at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 1 June with tickets from £15. There is a £15 Betrayal Rush scheme every Monday at 12pm for anyone under 30 who is a keyworker or in receipt of Job-Seekers Allowance. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook: Cultural Capital Theatre Blog.