Pinter Five and Six review, Harold Pinter Theatre, London: Jamie Lloyd's superbly curated season continues

Jane Horrocks and Rupert Graves offer wonderful performances in a selection of Pinter's shorter works

Rupert Graves in 'Pinter Five' at the Harold Pinter Theatre (Marc Brenner/Harold Pinter Theatre)

The fifth instalment of Jamie Lloyd’s superbly curated season of Harold Pinter’s shorter works kicks off with the writer’s first play, The Room, composed and first produced in 1957. Watching it in this sensitive, powerfully acted revival by Patrick Marber (his friend and colleague), you marvel at how strongly formed the dramatist’s creative identity seems to have been from the outset. The atmosphere of undefined menace; the surreal banalities of everyday speech; the sense of treacherous, dizzying chasms lurking beneath the crust of diurnal existence; the horror of intruders invading personal space – many of the features that would go on to be classified as “Pinteresque” are present and awaiting development in this one-act piece.

Jane Horrocks gives a wonderfully well-sustained portrait of the wound-up state of Rose, who anxiously natters to her silently abusive husband (Rupert Graves) as she serves him up bacon and weak tea and talks about the icy world outside their windows. Horrocks’s Rose chafes her hands compulsively as though she were cold to the bone and Soutra Gilmour’s excellent set, with its thin walls in battleship grey and lemon-striped unlined curtains, suggests the hard, joyless battle to maintain respectability.

Horrocks vividly conveys her embattled bemusement over the weirdly comic/sinister uncertainties regarding the house. She asks the elderly garrulous landlord (Nicholas Woodeson) how many floors it has. “Ah, we had a good few of them in the old days..” he responds with maddening vagueness. And she captures pungently the horribly reflex xenophobia with which she reacts to anything foreign as a threat, particularly vicious and panicking when she is visited by a blind black man called Riley (Colin McFarlane) who has come with a mission to summon her home.

This production does not treat The Room as a historical curio (though it’s wisely set in period); it holds you agog because it is so perceptively alert to what Pinter was feeling his way towards. It feels like a perpetual work in progress.

For Pinter Five, Marber directs it alongside Victoria Station (1982) and Family Voices (1981) which are about breakdowns in communication. He brings out both the revue-like clarity and the penumbra of existential mystery in former. The radio contact between cabbie and controller ought to be crystalline and peaceable. But McFarlane’s controller is driven frantic when driver 274 (Graves) refuses to move when asked to pick up an important customer at Victoria Station. His reasons are infuriating. Though a professional cabbie, he says that he does not know the whereabouts of Victoria and that he has fallen in love with the girl on the back seat who is a current client: “I think I am going to stay in this car with her for the rest of my life” (there’s a suspicion that he might have like). The actors’ faces peer out, as though they have now entered different modes of being. The apertures to their separate worlds are close together on set (they are the back view of the windows in The Room, all the more emphasising the distance between the awol driver’s wan puzzlement and the impatience of the angry and cajoling controller.

With some eloquent choreography heightening the triangle of alienated relationships, Marber brings Family Voices (originally a radio play) to the stage, Luke Fallon particularly winning as the estranged son whose defection starts off this thwarted.

It’s the two plays in Pinter Six – Party Time (1991) and Celebration (2000) – that mesh most with the themes in The Room. A trendy London health club and the top restaurant in town may sound a far cry from a bedsit in a rooming house. But there’s a consistency to Pinter’s primitive preoccupations – threats to perceived territory and what people will do to fight them off; the vain desire to dim out the sounds of loneliness and disappointment – despite the shift in milieu.

In the swanky eaterie in Celebration, a pair of East End new-moneyed wide boys (Ron Cook, Phil Davis) – a pair of brothers married to a pair of sisters (Tracy-Ann Oberman, Celia Imrie) are having a “piss-up dinner” to celebrate a wedding anniversary. Their group eventually merges with that of a banker (John Simm) and his wife who seems to have known Ron Cook’s Lambert “behind the filing cabinets” earlier in her career.

In Party Time, the revels persist while armed “round-ups” are taking place on the streets outside. The talk is of the exclusive club which has been inspired by “moral awareness”. Pinter had an admirable liberal philosophy but could sometimes seem oddly authoritarian in his methods for making us share his views on, say, incipient fascism. Hence the nudging on words such as “agenda” and the heavy-handedness of the symbolism.

Pinter has some exuberant fun at the expense of the cultural ignorance of the nouveau in Celebration (“None of them could reach the top notes. Could they?” says one of them at the ballet that they have come from). But the play rejoices in the juicy drunken profanity of its vulgarians and the production – a riot of gold lame, piled-up tresses, and a grand chandelier that seems to parp at the shift between sections – catches the joie de vivre in the writing brilliantly. Pinter in a less inspired mood would have made a meal (so to speak) that the brothers are “strategy consultants” enforcing the peace. But he allows them moments of stray vulnerability and these make their squiffy sentimentality about its complimentary gherkins not wholly despicable. Adam Poopola is perfection as the waiter with his bizarrely name-dropping “interjections”. A cause for Celebration indeed.

To 26 January