Pinter 7, Harold Pinter Theatre, London, review: This season will be much missed

It’s hard to credit the profusion of top talent that has been involved in this project over the past six months

(Marc Brenner)

Succulent casting has been one of the treats of Pinter at the Pinter, Jamie Lloyd’s splendid rolling season of short Pinter works. It’s hard to credit the profusion of top talent that he has managed to involve in this project over the past six months. I’m happy to report that this slight sense of incredulity persists as the series now draws to a close. Pinter 7 is an intriguing double bill of early work.

In The Dumb Waiter (written in 1957 but not performed until 1960), Danny Dyer and Martin Freeman play Ben and Gus, a pair of contract killers anxiously awaiting orders in a windowless Birmingham basement. In A Slight Ache (which made its first appearance on radio in 1959), Gemma Whelan and John Heffernan are marvellously funny and creepy as the middle-class couple whose sexless, inadequate marriage is overturned when they invite a filthy old matchseller into their home on a midsummer day.

The Dumb Waiter is unmistakably Pinteresque to the point of parody – fully achieved in its mixture of comedy and menace. A Slight Ache doesn’t quite work but perhaps lingers in the mind longer. The edgy cross-talk in Lloyd’s production of the former potently captures the feel of Tony Hancock-meets-Tarantino with further script input from Abbott and Costello. Both men are on edge. Freeman is all questions and neurotic restlessness as Gus (you can see he might not be the ideal candidate for this line of work). Dyer retreats behind his newspaper with an evasive intensity.

Then the dumb waiter crashes into the basement, with its written request for “Two braised steak and chips. Two sago puddings. Two teas without sugar.” The actors are very funny as they scramble to appease its repeated inexplicable demands with the lowly grub they have brought for their pre-murder snacks, and create an atmosphere that frantically blends the prosaic and the panic-stricken. Spot on – and all to the good that the last minute twist has the sickening feeling of inevitability.

Lloyd’s production recognises the radio origins of A Slight Ache, staging the play in Soutra Gilmour’s mock-up of a soundproofed recording, replete with an “On Air” light. The actors deliver their lines into microphones. It’s not done rigorously – unlike, say, Katie Mitchell’s attempts to find a way of staging the radio works of Beckett. But there are distinct advantages to presenting it like this. The matchseller is a silent presence who brings out the insecure, snobbish bully in Edward, the husband he irrationally unnerves, and the sensually unsatisfied woman in the wife who dotes on flowers and is aptly named Flora after the Goddess of Gardens.

To give this figure flesh and blood onstage is to rob him of his mystery. Lloyd’s staging, in which the couple talk to an empty space, allows for the option that he is a projection of their fears and desires. Heffernan is hilariously ghastly as the sour, spineless Edward. He hits the note of patronising palliness with excruciating exactness when inviting the matchseller into his study.

Gemma Whelan’s excellent Flora speaks with clenched BBC vowels and her awakening is partly signalled by the fact that she starts making most of the sound effects at the Foley table. She longs to show the matchseller “my garden, your garden” with its convolvulus and japonica. The production visually underscores the swap-over of roles with sharp wit: if there’s anybody wearing a balaclava on a hot summer’s day by the end, it’s not the matchseller. And it also intimates that this might only be happening in their minds. This season will be much missed. The good news is that there is a coda in the shape of a production of Betrayal starring Tom Hiddleston. What did I say about casting?