Theatre review: Pinter Three - Landscape / Apart From That / Girls / That’s All / God’s District / Monologue / That’s Your Trouble / Special Offer / Trouble in the Works / Night / A Kind of Alaska

If there’s a running theme to Pinter Three, the hendecuple* bill that continues Jamie Lloyd’s collection of the playwright’s short writings to mark ten years since his death, it’s a kind of bittersweet romance. It’s something that becomes most apparent in Night, the penultimate piece in which Meera Syal and Tom Edden play a long-married couple whose love seems to remain genuine and strong, but whose memories of their relationship differ entirely: They each remember their first date completely differently, and may in fact be recalling encounters with different people - but does it even matter? The evening is bookended by the longest plays, and Night’s miscommunication somewhat mirrors the opener, Landscape, in which Beth (Tamsin Greig) and Duff (Keith Allen) have a conversation consisting of two entirely different threads – he recounting his day, she remembering stories from the early days of their relationship.

The fact that they don’t interact, and that Beth is speaking dispassionately into a microphone while Duff gets more and more agitated immediately signals the fact that something else is going on, and as the real situation becomes apparent Landscape builds into a sad story of mounting frustration.

There’s missed romantic opportunities in Monologue, in which a man imagines a confrontation with the old friend who stole the woman he loved – although whether there was ever any real romantic rival or he’s just berating himself for failing with her is increasingly up for debate. Lee Evans has come out of retirement (I didn’t even realise he had retired from live performance, but the last thing I saw him in was Barking In Essex so it’s perfectly understandable that he decided he’d had enough) specially to perform this monologue, as well as a number of the shorter sketches spread across the evening.

Pinter taps into a very British kind of melancholy in Apart From That, in which Evans and Syal both claim to be fine apart from the one unmentionable thing that's completely destroying their lives, but most of the sketches are comic. Soutra Gilmour’s costume design seems to be deliberately invoking Monty Python when Evans and Edden team up for That’s Your Trouble, while the funniest scene of the evening pairs them again for Trouble in the Works, which feels like a sketch comedy classic – the fact that it deals particularly in frantic, convoluted wordplay gives it a feel of The Two Ronnies more than anything. As for That’s All, featuring Evans, Allen and Edden as gossiping old women, that’s very much… an experience.

Many of the scenes featuring one or two actors have the rest of the cast stay on stage with them, and Greig spends the entire second act in bed waiting for the climactic A Kind of Alaska. Pinter’s response to Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings, it sees Greig’s Deborah wake up from a sleep she fell into at the age of 16; Allen’s doctor Hornby has been treating her ever since, but has only now succeeded in reviving her after nearly 30 years. It’s a gently sad piece but the real emotional heft comes when her younger sister Pauline (Syal) arrives earlier than the doctor expected, and the extent to which she’s aged forces Deborah to confront just how much of her life she’s lost.

Both Landscape and A Kind of Alaska go on a little bit longer than is strictly necessary – the latter gets sidetracked into a cryptic exchange about Hornby that it doesn’t really need – but there’s no question that the combined force of the two Future Dames makes it a memorable finale. At this point it’s no surprise if Greig is extraordinary as the little girl who doesn’t realise – or increasingly doesn’t want to realise – that she’s in an adult’s body, but Syal also pulls at the heartstrings as the woman whose life has been defined by caring for a sick sister, and who now has to face Deborah’s less-than-grateful reaction. The threads connecting the eleven pieces may not be as immediately obvious as those in Pinter One, but the fact that this leads to a lot more variety in tone makes this one of the most successful evenings in the collection so far.

Pinter Three - Landscape / Apart From That / Girls / That’s All / God’s District / Monologue / That’s Your Trouble / Special Offer / Trouble in the Works / Night / A Kind of Alaska by Harold Pinter is booking in repertory until the 8th of December at the Harold Pinter Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

*well yes of course I had to look it up