Harold Pinter theatre, London
Antony Sher, David Suchet and Hayley Squires are among the cast for a compelling set of works by the master playwright
Jamie Lloyd has had the bold, bright idea of bringing together all of Harold Pinter’s one-act plays in a season comprising seven separate programmes and lasting six months. And what exactly do you learn from the opening pair – Pinter One and Two – which can be seen on a single day? That Pinter has the capacity to both terrify and tantalise but, above all, that the division of his works into the political and the personal is ludicrously artificial: whether the context is the public or the private world, he is always fascinated by the roots of power.
Pinter One, containing nine pieces including plays, poems and sketches, deals more obviously with domination and has a pulverising quality that left a matinee audience emerging dazed into the sunlight. But even here there was evidence of Pinter’s black humour. The most astonishing piece was the premiere of the recently discovered The Pres and an Officer, in which a US president (an orange-complexioned, blond-quiffed Jon Culshaw) orders the nuking of London under the impression it is the capital of France.
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