Monologue, National Theatre: Cottesloe, London

Conversations with an empty chair

The day may yet dawn when the National Theatre treats us to one of those short, early evening shows in which Douglas Hodge and Lia Williams will pausefully read from Harold Pinter's credit-card statements. This establishment is certainly in the process of giving us everything else related to him. Coming up in February, there's entertainment built from the great man's Sketches; and now, for the next few evenings in the Cottesloe, there's the rare chance to see his 45- minute Monologue, written in the early Seventies and first seen in an ill-fated television production.

The effect of watching Gari Jones's staging was to make me wonder whether radio is the medium in which it would work best. This might seem a perverse verdict, given that Monologue is intent on presenting us with a strange stage-picture. A middle-aged man on his own premises talks to an empty armchair. This entirely absent figure is his former best friend. With slight shades of Shakespeare's sonnets, the friendship comes to grief over a Dark Lady who switched her affections from the speaker to his better-looking mate. Only here, the lady was racially dark, too. "Black as the ace of spades. And a life-lover to boot." It is evidently some time since the man has seen either of the others.

Recalling how the woman had fallen for his friend's dangerous detachment, the speaker avers that "the ones that keep silent are the best off". But if silence is power, absence must be the last word in passive aggression. It is this paradox that the piece plays on, with italicised irony: "The thing I like, I mean quite immeasurably, is this kind of conversation, this kind of exchange, this class of mutual reminiscence," declares the speaker to the vacant chair.

The visual aspect creates problems, though, in a production as heavy-handed and busy as Jones's. He has Henry Woolf, who plays the man, pour his supposed interlocutor a glass of beer that he sets down beside his non-existent feet. Such touches stir up unhelpful memories of Harvey, the film in which a lush chums up with an invisible 6ft rabbit. Woolf, a smallish bearded man ably traces the journey from pint-sized assertiveness ("How would you like a categorical thrashing?" he asks, suggesting a game of ping-pong) to a lovely final wavering between a bleak sense of what might have been, and desolately willed delusion that this is actually the case.

But he is not helped by a production that at times comes perilously close to cliché and sentimentality. At the start, for example, the speaker is listening to a tape of a jazz version of "Yesterdays". But that's about as crashingly obvious as it would be thumpingly ironic to play "Tomorrow" from Annie as background music in the second half of Macbeth. With that and Nat King Cole's version of "These Foolish Things", to which Woolf dances with an unseen partner, the occasion is in danger of turning into "Krapp's Last Musicassettes".

It's interesting how this infrequently performed piece confirms the primacy of the fraternal male bond in Pinter's writing. In Betrayal, for example, the relationship between the two men feels more charged than that between the woman and either lover or husband. Here, there's a ghastly pathos in the speaker's attempt to insist on a kind of actual brotherhood ("I'd have been their uncle... I'm your children's uncle"). I'd like to see the piece staged by Pinter, whose masterly production of No Man's Land is still running in rep at the National.

23 and 24 Jan (020-7452 3000)