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| LIibby Purves
The Times June 17 2011 12:01AM This is Pinter for people who don’t think they like Pinter. No political ranting, no wilful obscurity, no gnomic crypto-wisdoms: just a recognisable middle-class setting and a clear reason for the menacing pauses. Add to that the frisson of upmarket kiss-and-tell that hung around it ever since it was revealed, years after its 1978 opening, that it more or less told the story of Harold Pinter’s own adulterous affair with Joan Bakewell and of the fact that her husband — his friend — knew about it and kept schtumm. Then cast the magnetic, intelligently sultry Kristin Scott Thomas as the woman, Emma, get Ian Rickson to direct with forensic precision, and you have 90 minutes of slightly guilty pleasure — a vodka martini of a play, with Scott Thomas as the thrillingly melting ice-cube and Ben Miles and Douglas Henshall as the cherry and umbrella. It reveals its multilayered emotional dishonesties in a backwards chronology, which challenges the actors to “lose” awareness of the moods and disappointments that they have just played and become younger and less knowing with each scene. They achieve this, especially Scott Thomas. Her ability to convey suffering and conflict with her great dark eyes softens the essentially misogynistic nature of Pinter’s script: struggling with her keyring as she abandons the lovenest, she sends a real jolt of pain across the theatre. In the first scene — the 1977 café reunion of the ex-lovers after two years apart — she and Henshall look at one another at first with real pleasure: two raddled ageing cats remembering seven years of secret cream. It darkens as they ask stiltedly after one another’s children, and Emma reveals that she and her husband are breaking up and that she has confessed. Which is the second betrayal, because she knows that he knew four years earlier, and still went on lunching with his rival. Further ambiguities and delicate explosions follow, paced beautifully. The men are nicely differentiated. Ben Miles as Robert is hard-edged, leather-jacketed and simmering with unfulfilled violence, Henshall’s Jerry a great big corduroy softie, the coward who wants to have his cake and eat it: family home and illicit flat. The latter, incidentally, is part of a nifty folding set by Jeremy Herbert that moves smoothly between scenes, sometimes splitting to show the ghostly presence of a bygone bed; care is taken to achieve authentic Kilburn-1970’s stained wallpaper. Everything is immaculate: Scott Thomas’s clothes and hair convincingly rejuvenate her as the years roll backwards, and Miles too ends up looking and moving more youthfully. Even his face softens to innocence in the final (or first) moments. Henshall looks roughly the same throughout, but then literary agents often do. The men’s relationship, founded on squash and criticising fellow-literati for writing books based on their duff marriages (oh, the irony!), is just homoerotic enough. And Henshall’s toshy, drunken declaration of love in 1968 is, wickedly, played as plain hilarious. Poor saps: their design for living was as base as the decade deserved. |