- The Observer,
- Sunday February 3 2008
Foxing the audience ... Gina McKee and Richard Coyle in The Lover. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
The Lover/The Collection
Comedy Theatre, London SW1
Neither of these early plays, The Lover and The Collection, originally written for television in the 1960s, is first-division Pinter. At times, they seem too slender to sustain themselves. But they go together like twinset and pearls and it is for the occasional pearls that they earn their keep. Both are about marriage and its torments. Each shows that imagined betrayal is as potent as proven infidelity.
In The Lover, a husband and wife act out adulterous fantasies with one another in the afternoon. The husband, stiffly reconstituted as lover, calls on his wife - now rehearsing her role as mistress. Their claustrophobic play-acting is situated between tension and tedium. They are comic and cruel as they practise their sexual games, ending up under the tea table until the crockery rattles. What Pinter does best, here, is to fox the audience: one loses one's emotional bearings until the couple's inner life and external reality seem almost indistinguishable.
Gina McKee looks like a Max Ernst painting but sounds like Joyce Grenfell. She has flawless comic instincts yet manages to be enigmatic and predatory at the same time. Listen out for the hideous laugh she produces before reporting flatly that her lover has a wonderful sense of humour. Richard Coyle is tremendous as her genially bullying husband and unpleasant lover. He has an avid look as he sucks hungrily on his cigarette. The dialogue is full of speedy innuendo, delivered crisply, as if they were in a Noel Coward play gone strangely awry. At one point, the husband tells the wife that he discusses her with his mistress as you might 'an antique music box'. It's a wonderful moment - an apparently random but drastic image - one of the pearls.
The Collection begins with a menacing telephone call. The old-fashioned phone kiosk seems to encroach on the private space of a sitting-room (suitably invasive design by Soutra Gilmour). Again, betrayal is the theme. James (Coyle) believes that his wife Stella (McKee) has slept with Bill (Charlie Cox) at a fashion conference. It is a play in which leading questions are never answered. Adultery may or may not have happened. And the homoerotic undertow is inconclusive. Timothy West plays Harry, Bill's testy old guardian/lover fastidiously - a combination of helplessness and defiance. There are pearls in this play too, such as the surreal moment when James spits olive stones into his wallet, without cracking a smile. And Cox's Bill has a cheeky charm that could be described as winning - if it were a play in which winning were possible. Jamie Lloyd directs both plays with the necessary sang-froid.
