Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
3 stars
Harold Pinter’s 1978 study of an affair among London literary types and
its aftermath is both his most grown-up work and his most
self-indulgent. Dominic Hill’s production – his first as artistic
director of the Citz – catches both facets, albeit without ever making
you feel much in the way of empathy with the publisher, the agent, the
wife or the lovers onstage. But then, as things painfully unwind across
a decade that begins two years after the end of Jerry’s long-term amour
with his best friend Robert’s wife Emma, and closes with Jerry’s first
clumsy drunken pass, it’s hardly Hill’s fault.
On one level, as Cal MacAninch’s Robert, Neve McIntosh’s Emma and Hywel
Simons’ Jerry navigate their way through the sort of awkward silences
and knowing banter that only former intimates can stumble into, any
trademark earnestness is ironed out by a recognition of the
self-absorbed ridiculousness of it all. Yet there are moments when the
delivery overloads each line with an unnecessary weight that they're
perfectly capable of carrying by itself.
As giant screens criss-cross each other at the front of Colin
Richmond’s slowly revolving set inbetween each scene while Dan Jones’
mordant score seeps out, the play nevertheless remains an exquisitely
melancholy study of lives in reverse, and how seemingly insignificant
moments rack up a set of long-term consequences. We never see Jerry
affectionately throw Robert and Emma’s infant daughter up in the air,
but it stays with him longer than Emma does.
The play’s time arc, from a jaded and slightly desperate 1977, to the
endless possibilities of 1968, looks today like a metaphor of romance
on a far grander scale. Yet, as with this grandest of affairs, it’s never quite
enough.
The Herald, March 7th 2012
ends
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